Grape Picking in Burgundy

I am now at that point of my life where I and my friends have mostly all finished university and are now settling into whichever stream will carry us to our retirement. Unsurprisingly, most people are working in The City, whether as lawyers or bankers or some other nebulous financial profession. A few braver and probably more admirable souls are pursuing careers in academia. And others are merely flailing about, looking for something solid to hold on to. It is true to say that we have not graduated at a particularly good time.

Of all my friends, however, it is Sophie for whom I have the most respect. She decided to work on a vineyard in Burgundy rather than engage in any kind of rat-race. Hard, physical labour, an outdoor environment – she knew, as Wittgenstein did, that these are often the surest paths towards a happy, long, and restful sleep. She went against pressures, social and otherwise, in pursuing this, and in doing so rather showed the rest of us up by demonstrating that whatever one’s educational background, however well-bred one is, still the ultimate barrier to us working in a similar field is only our own cowardice.

I was visiting Sophie last week, just before the year’s grape picking began. That was the plan, at any rate. But the start of the harvest is unpredictable, and in the week before I arrived, I learned, rather concerningly, that instead of spending three days relaxing with an old friend, I would have to be on the fields with her, toiling away. Well, I thought, at least it will be an experience. And indeed it was.

Prejudices

Though I grew up on a farm, I never really participated in its operations, and though I live in the countryside now, I still look on those who live from the land with uncomprehending admiration. Like most people without experience of actual farm labour, I had a somewhat idealised view of things. Rather than rely on what little I remembered from our hard life in Scotland, my main inspiration was Tolstoy’s Levin, out on the fields in Anna Karenina. I believed that work outside is tough but rewarding, an opportunity to fall into a community where everyone looks out for everyone else, and that on the fields God lurks underneath each unturned stone. At the same time, however, I retained a certain cynicism. I thought that farmers were boring and bigoted, and that I was probably wrong to like the idea of the work. In short, I believed while constantly doubting what I believed.

What was surprising was that my suspicions, or rather my hopes, about the work, were far closer to reality than my cynicism was.

People

The farm we were working on was only about ten hectares, or twenty-five acres, and it was family run. Unlike other vineyards, or indeed most fruit picking jobs (as I understand it), the work here was rather light. Many of the pickers were regulars, people who came year after year. So long as the work was done, the pace was not overly important. We had a long lunch break each day, and a good number of rests during the day too. Although we were bussed about in vans, there was little else to connect us with the horror stories one reads of about migrant fruit pickers.

There were about twenty-five of us to begin with, and that number grew slightly once the weekend came around. I was the only Englishman; there were about seven or eight Poles; the rest were all French, though not necessarily from Burgundy. Except for the Poles, who spoke English, everyone else spoke French. For me, someone who hasn’t studied French in about seven years, and who has never really spoken the language, having to speak French was something I really should have anticipated. What I could not have predicted, however, was how easily I found myself speaking it.

Everyone knows the stereotype of the English or American abroad who refuses even to attempt to speak the local language. The French with me certainly knew it. It was partly because of that that I found it so easy to speak – I knew that even trying would stand me in good stead. And then, I think, and just as important, there was the matter of perfectionism. Precisely because I was out of practice, precisely because I had not studied French at university, I did not give a damn how I sounded – I just wanted to speak. And so my words were wrong, my speech a bizarre blend of French and English and occasionally any other available language too, and to top it all off, I apparently spoke with a Russian accent. But I was speaking, and as the days went by, I was speaking more and more, complex sentences even. The words were coming back to me, dug up from whatever deep recesses of my mind that they had hidden themselves. I even managed to learn a few new words too.

I would not have had so much success with the French if the people there were not so friendly. Almost without exception everyone was willing to talk to me, in one or multiple languages. And I met a random, but loveable, bunch of people. One man, in his fifties, with a sailor’s faded tattoos, a squashed nose, and a cigarette permanently poking out of his mouth, seemed unable to pick without removing his shirt, revealing a gigantic belly that rolled over the top of his disarmingly short shorts. A young guy in his late teens, who had previously been an apprentice at the vineyard, wore a different pair of football tracksuits each day, could not speak any English whatsoever, but got incredibly excited every time I said the word “whisky” for him. He would come up to me, ramble away in French for a minute, enjoying the look of dismay on my face, and then start to laugh. His good nature was infectious. I felt rather better when one of the other Frenchmen told me that this fellow spoke with the local dialect and that none of them understood most of what he said either.

Each lunch we were served by an enormous woman who had turned herself into such a wobbler that she could only walk with the aid of a stick – she was aided in her cooking by an equally large husband. The food they produced, however, was always filling, and delivered in generous helpings. I met a Bhutanese-Frenchman who had trained as a monk and seemed to spend all day drinking, and lots of pleasant young Poles, picking just because it was a bit of fun. The only person who ever bothered me was a mister T, the tractor driver, who was about my age. On my first day I looked up to see the Frenchman storming down my row towards me, shouting and gesticulating wildly in his finest French. I thought perhaps I had left something down by the tractor, but it turned out – after everyone else had stopped picking and several volunteer translators had jumped to my aid – that I had been picking particularly awfully, and that mister T (whose role had nothing to do with this) was very displeased. When he had finished berating me, he noticed that the rest of the field was glaring at him, and he backed down somewhat. Unsurprisingly, after that he did not bother me further. And for my part I tried to pick a little better.

Property

Perhaps the people who I liked best were the owners of the vineyard. The boss, P-, was only twenty-nine, and he still shared some responsibilities with his father. The vineyard is run very much as a family affair. Without teamwork, the whole thing would fall apart. This is because of French inheritance law, which is among the strictest I have come across. Nobody can be disinherited, and property must be equally divided among the children. In practice, this means that France has a high rate of inheritance-related murders. It also means that major wine-producers, including major champagne brands like Taittinger, have suffered due to the enforced division of their lands. This vineyard has already been divided by a generation or two, and that means that some of the land belongs to people who don’t work there or have any real connection to the place – instead they simply rent it back to their family, as generously or stingily as they wish.

P, his father, his uncle, his sister, and his girlfriend – these were the family. Responsibilities are divided and so far, order and financial stability has been preserved. How many more generations it can last, however, is hard to say.

P himself was an interesting character, though I did not speak to him much. He is well-educated, tall, bespectacled, and was always trudging around in shorts and big brown wellington boots. There is something of a low-budget Harry Potter cosplay about him. But what is most striking is how out of place he is here, with his reading and his interests. He is quiet, bashful even, and slow to express an opinion. Whether he is a good leader is not my place to say, but certainly he is an atypical vineyard boss. I would like to write a story about him, one of those classical tales of one being forced, not entirely against one’s will, into fulfilling a duty that nevertheless takes one away from the place where one would really be able to flourish. P’s girlfriend was also lovely, an extraordinarily friendly woman who was an artist and seemed to carry the sun around in her chest. While we were picking she would always be suggesting silly games to play, like naming every writer beginning with each letter of the alphabet, and such like. Whenever P was with her, suddenly his reservations disappeared, and he too seemed to shine with a kind of light. He smiled, he played, he ran about with their dogs. There is a story there.

Picking

Each morning I woke up at sixish, and we started work on the fields at seven thirty. Grape picking can be automated, but currently the robots aren’t quite so good as the people. We are able to better identify things like rot and unripe grapes while we are picking, but it’s hard to say how long we’ll hold onto our advantage. It almost doesn’t matter, anyway, because fewer and fewer young people are getting involved with their local vineyards, and this means that automation will become a necessity in a few years, whatever happens with the technology.

The process of grape picking is simple. You are given some secateurs and told to gather your grapes in a bucket. People with large backpack-buckets go up and down collecting the contents of your bucket, once it’s filled, and take the grapes to the tractor, where they will be sorted a second time, and taken back to base. You can cut your grapes in different ways. If you have good core strength you can squat at each vine, or else you can kneel – the Poles all came with knee protection, as if they were actually going roller-skating. Finally, if you are lazy like me, you can sit on the ground, and slide crablike down your row. This is very slow, but less painful. And given work only ends at five-thirty, it’s best to avoid what pain you can.

We were cutting red grapes, at least while I was there. These grapes are easier to spot than white grapes, but they can still pose a challenge. You sometimes have to tear down masses of leaves to get to the grapes, giving the whole thing a rather adventurous feel, as though you are actually travelling through the Amazon jungle, but it means that it’s easy to miss a bunch or two. Sometimes the vines are diseased or have something else wrong with them and their leaves turn red, which makes it much harder to find the grapes underneath.

The grapes themselves can have issues too. Ideally, they are slightly glassy, translucent, like marbles. But when only half-ripe they can be almost matte, and a deep bluey-red. This year was not a good year for the harvest. We had to pick many bunches that were not wholly ready. And those that we picked also had major issues with rot, so that after picking each bunch we often had to stand there scraping the puffs of white dust out from the centre of the grapes. This took as much time as the picking, sometimes more. But if too much rot gets into the vats, the resultant wine can have its taste completely spoilt.

I was a slow worker. Except for one of the Polish girls, for whom it was also the first time, I was the slowest. But I did my best to make up for it by being diligent. It was a strange experience, working in a family business like this. I knew exactly who I was working for, and this made me redouble my efforts even when my strength was flagging. I wanted these people to succeed. I remember the despair in P’s uncle’s eyes as he sat there, sorting the rotten grapes. They could all see that everything was going wrong, and I didn’t want to make it any worse for them.

On the final day, it was raining. Heavily. We went out onto the fields late and returned after only an hour. It was hellish in the rain. I do not think that a comparison to the battlefields of the First World War is entirely out of the question, to the fields of mud of the Somme. My boots were caked in a toecap of mud. My clothes were wet and sticky with the stuff. In the darkness and the rain the grapes were almost impossible to make out. They seemed to live a kind of ghostly, phantom existence, forever hiding just out of reach behind another clump of leaves. My basket accumulated bunches incredibly slowly. A general hopelessness ruled the day. And though I was wearing a raincoat, it felt as if the rain was seeping through it into my bones. We all worked slowly then. And I was very glad when it was over.

Pride

Grape picking is generally not done in the rain because it is inefficient and ineffective. The other two days I worked the sun had shone and everything was golden. And it is those days that I will remember best, for those days are the days that I worked properly. However much he was an idiot for idolising peasants, I do not think that Tolstoy was wrong for valuing physical labour like this. For a couple of days I went to bed exhausted and slept well. My body ached, but in a good way – as though it were thanking me for using it the way it was supposed to be used after so long spent sitting in chairs and walking around cities. I felt part of a collective, I felt welcomed, I spoke French. These are all extraordinary things. I am sure that if I had stayed longer my body would have collapsed and I would have ended up sitting in the middle of a row, my bucket on my head, in tears. But I would not blame the work for that. I would only blame myself for not starting to work sooner.

Labouring alongside others draws us closer to them. Language proved no barrier, nor did education, nor class, nor anything else. I came across a common humanity, one that we always suspect the existence of, but don’t always see. I came across real work too – work in which one feels a relinquishing of the self, and even some of that magic force which takes hold of Levin while he’s out on the fields. While I was working I thought a lot about a particular quote of Whitman’s, one that to me reflects the reality of work as I experienced it:

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,

Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is a great heat in the fire.

From the cinder-strew’d threshold I follow their movements,

The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,

Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,

They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself section 12

Each man hits his place. I was dreadfully slow with my picking. But I was there; I took part; I felt a part of something greater than myself, and something valuable too. The pain I felt on falling asleep and on waking, the aches and sores – these I will forget. But the pride of working will go with me forever. I certainly do not think that we need to work on the fields every day of our lives. Life is not so simple as that. But spending a week or two of each year out there, working, sweating, burning – after having a taste of it, I cannot find anything to say against it. This is real life.

And next year, if my silly office job allows me to take the time off, I will experience it again.

Negative Character Growth in Chekhov’s Ionych

I have been reading Chekhov again. Chekhov is one of those writers who brings me such joy, and this is because he knows how to write. He reminds one that it is possible to write well, something not all writers, and certainly not all Russians, do. I wanted to write about “The Lady with the Dog”, and had even started a plan to that end, but I was so struck by “Ionych” (the next story I reread) that I felt I had to begin with it. “Ionych” is fascinating because it is a story about negative growth. The country doctor, Dmitry Ionych Startsev, falls in love with a young lady, is teased and rejected by her, and then decides to become a thoroughly unlikeable person as a result, leading him eventually to reject her himself when she realises much later that she had made a mistake in turning him down.

Negative growth is interesting because we are generally used to characters growing in positive directions. Our villains turn good, our good get better. Where mistakes are made, they are the result of bad character – of cowardice, or anger. But stories rarely show how entire lives can become mistakes, and how good people can become bad. That’s why it’s worth looking at “Ionych” in more detail.

The Plot

Dmitry Ionych Startsev is a country doctor who has recently arrived in the vicinity of the town of S. An educated man, as doctors generally are, Ionych is welcome in what little society there is in S., though his countryside practice means he rarely has time to visit the town. The society in S. is very limited, as is always the case in Chekhov’s provincial towns. The highlight, however, is the Turkin family – husband and wife, and their daughter Ekaterina, who is also known as Kotik (Kitty). Mr Turkin speaks in a very mannered way and tells funny anecdotes, his wife writes novels and reads them aloud to guests, and Kotik plays the piano. All this means that they are able to put on entertaining evenings for the inhabitants of their town. 

Eventually, Ionych manages to find the time to visit them. He is particularly entranced by Kotik, with the “innocent child’s expression on her face and the smooth, thin waist”. Though there is some family tension, for Kotik wishes to go to a conservatory to improve her playing and her mother decidedly does not desire this, and some of the usual dreadful treatment of young girls that we are probably used to if this is not our first time reading 19th century Russian literature (Kotik is barely allowed out of the house, so that she is protected from any and all “bad influences”), still the evening is generally marked by peace and pleasantness for Ionych.

When Kotik’s mother develops migraines, Ionych is called into the town more often, spending plenty of time with the family. Perhaps the migraines are even a ploy to weld Kotik and Ionych together, because if she were married she would never be given the opportunity to leave her husband to study elsewhere. Whatever the case, Ionych is in love with dear Kotik. One day, however, Kotik decides to tease him, giving him a note requesting a moonlit meeting in a local graveyard. Ionych shows up; Kotik does not. But though he is annoyed, Ionych experiences a kind of Romantic revelation of the world’s beauty in the graveyard. When he next meets his love, Ionych proposes; Kotik rejects him. Indeed, she rejects him precisely because she wants the freedom that not being his wife would bring. The problem is not one of emotions. But either way, Ionych is defeated.

Four years pass. Ionych, who had begun his story walking around the countryside, now owns a practice both there and in the city; he has a large, expensive carriage too. At the same time, he has drawn away from people – he finds them stupid and boring. And they, in turn, have started calling him a “puffed-up Pole”, though he is not Polish. In short, where once he was poor and liked, now he is rich and disliked. Kotik, meanwhile, has aged into Ekaterina, and returns from the conservatory each summer, though Ionych avoids her. At home, she already feels a kind of stranger and ill at ease.

But eventually they meet, once more the handiwork of Kotik’s mother. This time is both a repetition and a rejection of what came before. “He remembered his love, his hopes and dreams, which had so worried him four years ago – and he was embarrassed at them”. Kotik’s mother reads again, Kotik’s father says the same idiotic phrases, and Kotik herself plays the piano – nothing has changed. But emotionally, everything is about to fall apart.

She looked at him and was obviously waiting for him to invite her into the garden, but he remained silent. “Oh how good that I didn’t marry her”, thought Startsev.

What a terrible thought to read. But it gets worse, for Kotik invites him into the garden herself. She admits that the conservatory had failed her, for all the young ladies she knew were able to play the piano, and she was nothing special. She tells him how she thought of him while she was in Moscow, how ideal he was. But he does not propose. He thinks of his money, back at home, and the flame she had rekindled in him is snuffed out. Everything annoys him. He goes home and never sees the family again, ignoring their messages to him.

Later still Ionych drives about town “like a Pagan God”, so rich is he. People call him Ionych, rather than his full name. He has become his name – and not the personal, familiar, Dmitry. Yet although he is lonely, bored, and finds everything distasteful and uninteresting, nothing changes. He does not realise that he has made a mistake. Meanwhile, over at the Turkins, nothing has changed either, except that everyone is a little older. Ekaterina has become Kotik again, and no doubt will stay like that, sad and unmarried, the rest of her life.

Negative Growth

This is the story of Ionych’s decline into caring only for his money. We might ask whether Ionych always showed signs of badness and a quickness to judge – one thing the narration (in Ionych’s voice), notes early on about Kotik is that she is “probably pure”. But this is I think insignificant, because everyone has a little bad in them, but few have that badness gain strength over the course of their life as Ionych does. To encounter an example of negative growth in Ionych is therefore a kind of surprise. Just as in real life, we rarely encounter negative growth in fiction. Characters, especially main characters, tend to become wiser, learning from their mistakes. However secular we are, we like to see redemption take place for the evil, and manifestations of grace.

But badness can get worse. We often talk about regrets as something bad, and certainly they are when they consume a life and distract it from the present. But regrets can also make possible the righting of past mistakes. Without the interiority that regrets imply, we cannot hope to grow. Ionych ends up shutting himself down once those four years have passed. Kotik briefly makes him think of the past, but his embarrassment leads him to destroy his interiority to protect himself. This also destroys her hopes of another proposal. At the end of the story it is the narrator who tells us that Ionych is lonely, because Ionych cannot do it himself. In fact, he is probably not even aware that it might be the case.

Experiences change us. Ionych’s walk in the graveyard shows that he had a developed sense of imagination, but his rejection means that he fully embraces a terrible, limited, materialism. As a story, “Ionych” tells us about the consequences of not paying attention to ourselves and the people we are becoming. Oftentimes experiences, especially those involving rejection, are difficult to bear. We always try to make the most of them, of course, but often this can lead to us distorting ourselves in ways that are unhealthy. With no love, we decide to focus on work, for example. We lose one “success” for another, but don’t realise that the relative values of each success are vastly different. Ultimately, “Ionych” is above all a warning of the consequences that befall anyone who does not remain watchful of who they are and who they are letting themselves become.

Ionych can be read in English here: http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1292/

Cowboy Time: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Wild West. There is something evocative about cowboys and Indians, big, open spaces, horseback rides, gunfights and barfights. The period of the Old West is a mythic period, yet also one that seems particularly close to us, particularly recent. As a comparatively lawless zone, it enables a more fluid morality, placing responsibility into the hands of individuals. As a place of violence, it makes us think more explicitly about the nature of human life and of its destiny. Westworld’s first season is probably my favourite television series; Butcher’s Crossing is one of my favourite books. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is another excellent Western, one consciously concerned with the way we construct and think of myth. As a coming-of-age story it is less brutal than McCarthy’s earlier Blood Meridian, but it still forces us to confront the truth of a harsh world.

Growing up is a matter of finding the truth beneath illusions. The Wild West is perhaps one of the ultimate illusions. It is a series of legends obscuring one of the most brutal periods of a brutal country, where murder, rape, and pillage were nothing and where whole cultures were annihilated at the pull of a trigger. John Grady, the sixteen-year-old hero of All the Pretty Horses, discovers the terrible vacuum underneath his idea of the world. His story is not a rejection of the West, but one where he becomes the kind of man who can survive in the West as it actually existed. It is the origin story of a real cowboy.

A desert.

The Plot: The Cowboys and their Trip

All the Pretty Horses takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, a time long beyond the end of the Wild West by most reckonings. The story begins with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the last male of the Grady line. Although his last name is Cole, after his father, John Grady’s respect for his grandfather leads him to go by his grandfather’s name instead. It is the first act of controlling one’s own identity featured in the book.

All is not well for the cowboys in the post-war period. The ranch where John Grady grew up is being sold, and both his mother and father are unable to provide parental support. Even his relationship with a local girl doesn’t seem worth bothering over anymore. Meanwhile, the landscape of great open spaces is becoming enclosed and dotted with oil derricks, as America consolidates its post-war economic ascendency. And so, with his friend Lacey Rawlins, and their horses, Redbo and Junior, in tow John Grady decides to head to Mexico in search of a better life.

“If I don’t go will you go anyways?”

John Grady sat up and put his hat on. “I’m already gone,” he said.

McCarthy has such verve for pithy, cinematic one-liners, and indeed his prose style as a whole owes much to cinema, with its emphasis on framing shots of its characters, often from unusual angles. People are often described not as they are, but how they are seen reflected within a window or glass object. In addition to being very cool, this flourish draws our attention to a certain distance between reality and our perception of it. Which is one of the key ideas of the book.

John Grady and Rawlins are always thinking of themselves through the lens of the Wild West and its myths. When they encounter a fellow escapee, a boy called Jimmy Blevins riding on a horse that is almost certainly stolen, they wonder whether they look like desperados to him. When they get new boots they are particularly excited because it appears that now they will really look like cowboys.

John Grady and Rawlins make it to Mexico. They start work on a big hacienda, or large estate. And John Grady falls in love with the owner’s daughter, a beautiful young lady named Alejandra. When she reciprocates his feelings, the scene is set for a passionate and illicit romance, but McCarthy allows us no rest, sending his story into Mexican prisons, through gunfights, and much more besides. Along the way John Grady becomes a real cowboy – scarred, rough, and more than a little heroic.

Truth

Becoming a cowboy is not just a question of going to Mexico, or stealing a horse. It is to engage in the mythmaking process that characterises the Wild West. If Blood Meridian was a shattering of our illusions about the West, All the Pretty Horses shows us how myths can instead be constructed. Thrown in jail because of his association with Blevins, initially John Grady speaks the truth as he understood it, explaining that he has nothing to do with Blevins’ criminal misdeeds to the police captain. It does not work. “You see. We can make the truth here. Or we can lose it”, says the captain. The character of the captain represents authority, embodying the truism that history is written by the victors. John Grady tries to protect his personal truth at first, but it is impossible to maintain that against the strong powers of the world.

When revenge comes, John Grady no longer describes the truth. He says what needs to be said to create a legend – he makes a legend out of himself, without consideration for whether strictly speaking what he says is true. For after all, who cares about the truth? Certainly not the captain, whose whole life is built upon the shame that came from a single moment of cowardice. The Wild West is a place where survival is difficult for those who are merely themselves. But for those who can stretch themselves into the boots of a myth, so long as they can shoot a rifle too, those people will flourish. Perhaps.

Nature and the World

“In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”

These words come from Alejandra’s grandmother, and they speak the central truth of All the Pretty Horses. Whatever hopes we may have, whatever dreams, they will prove worthless and firewood for an uncaring world. Early in the novel there is a bush into which countless little birds have been blown and impaled by the force of a great storm. It’s nothing special, just another description among many, but it too hints at the nature of the world. If there is a God, and the characters of McCarthy’s novel aren’t entirely sure on that front, then He doesn’t seem to care very much for his creation.

If anything, McCarthy sees the world as shaped by Man, and Man’s violence. I use the old-fashioned Man in part because McCarthy’s world is a Man’s world, and men are to blame for it. All the Pretty Horses is full of the traces of destruction men have wrought. From the oil derricks to the breaking of the horses, there seems no place where we have not brought pain and destroyed sacredness. The wild horses are deprived of their “communion” once they have been captured and broken. I know McCarthy is guilty of using biblical language liberally, but here it is entirely valid – we have broken the natural, spiritual bond of the animals, all that we might make use of them.

At another point McCarthy describes a storm thus: “as if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” Our world is made unnatural, industrial, by the simile. Yet who can say that the world we live in now is natural anymore? So much of it is covered by the traces of Man and his violence. The deepest desert has scraps of blue and black from discarded plastic. It is hard to be proud of ourselves, knowing both what we are capable of, and what we as a people have already managed.

The Values in the World

All the Pretty Horses does not suggest things will get better, either – it is no narrative of progress: “No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold”, and our hearts are not build for peace. We may transition from horses to pickups, from carriages to airplanes, but in the end one thing remains – we are a violent species, and we like war.

Yet unlike, I think, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses is a relatively positive book, finding in the amoral world values worth holding on to. First of all, and unmistakable, is beauty. It is somewhat silly to mention it, but even the novel’s title suggests this. And McCarthy’s style is awesome. It takes some getting used to, especially because it is so brazen in its approach – deliberately biblical, experimental, raw. But once we start running along McCarthy’s tracks, so to speak, we notice moments and phrases of such beauty that they make one want to cry:

“She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.”

That last clause is so unbelievable. I mean, it doesn’t even have to mean anything – it just sounds so good that I cannot get it out of my head.

And besides beauty, there are virtues too. Even old-world Wild West virtues. John Grady sticks up for the little guy; he tolerates no abuses of unearned authority; he is heroic and fearless. He falls in love and doesn’t let society get in the way, and he is a good friend to Rawlins. Even if his world is dying, John Grady is still a good guy by its own value system.

Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting…

Conclusion

I write this review in the desert sands of Jordan, the place of my own little Wild West adventure. All the Pretty Horses is one of those books I know I will read again. It contains that richness that always disheartens me when I try to write about books for this blog – there is simply too much to say, and what I write can do justice to almost nothing of the book’s power.

I love the easy themes, of loyalty and friendship and love, just as much as I love the darker, or more complex ones, hidden beneath the surface of the work, such as the ambiguous position of American power, or the bleak and empty moral content of the world. Most of all, perhaps, I love the language. Whether it is the pithiness of John Grady’s one-liners or the epic sweep of McCarthy’s landscapes and storms, All the Pretty Horses is a beautiful book.