I never saw the movie, "All the Pretty Horses", because I am an utmost purist. There can be no improvements upon this set of books as a whole and certainly Hollywood should not be the first to try. They are too magnificently crafted for even pictures to begin to create the same world as McCarthy does in his own novels. He is a thoughtful and bleak writer and if "The Old Man in the Sea" got to you, then certainly the Trilogy will.
These two young men, each traveling through the Southwest on quests that conjure up perils matching those Odysseus faced, are forced into choices with graver consequences than either can foresee. Their independent quests, which form the basis of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, intertwine in Cities of the Plain. Death is no stranger in any of the three books, but by the end of Cities on the Plain, it is irrelevant.
Though much has been written about the two central characters and their fates, in my view, McCarthy tends to amplify his characters more than he develops them for there is a sameness to each from start to end more in keeping with archetypes than real people.
McCarthy will build the tension to an almost maddening level at times, relying on vivid, detailed depictions of the now lost Southwest to slow the momentum. At times I felt like I was waiting for an iceberg to scuttle my ship: I could see its slow approach but could not forestall the inevitable. The layers and layers of description finely permeate your consciousness so that the clouds of dust, the smell of sweaty horses, the ache from a knife puncture, cold rain sliding under the collar down the spine take on the vividness usually imparted more powerfully by poetry than prose.
Sometimes, I must confess, the clipped style of the conversations and stacks of similes bothered me a bit because of what was not being said or shown but what lurked unstated like those half-formed thoughts we all harbor.
Yet writing with this level of detail about the land, the weather, the loneliness of souls on a quest, can take its toll and for all the pleasure these books bring, I must confess that I was not sorry to close the cover and shelve this book. Maybe I'll revisit it in 20 years; regardless, these characters are forever seared in my consciousness.
