Two young men, John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins, leave their hometown in Texas, and decide to move south to Mexico to find jobs as horsemen, which is their only skill. Both friends are 'true' characters, and the voice they receive from McCarthy is one of the real pleasures of the book. They are naive and experts, boys and already men, real friends but with questions for each other.
They meet a third, even younger man, skilled at shooting, out there on his own, needing help in a way, but without clear intentions or history. They travel together and encounter people, visit towns, come across natural challenges like rivers and storms, they get drunk, they find work, they get robbed, ... But below the surface, something more ominous is taking place: a world is changing. We are in 1949. We enter a new era. The old world is disappearing and a new world is opening up: the old western cowboy world with the new one, but also geographically, between the north and the south, between the local and the global.
A rich Mexican farmer expands: "They went to France for their education. He and Gustavo. And others. All these young people. They all returned full of ideas. Full of ideas, and yet there seemed to be no agreement among them. How do you account for that? Their parents sent them for these ideas, no? And they went there are received them. Yet when they returned they opened their valises, so to speak, no two contained the same thing. ... People of my generation are more cautious. I think we dont believe that people can be improved in their character by reason. That seems a very french idea". The solid foundations of simple community ideas seem to be shaken. What was taken for granted suddenly becomes shaken.
And then at an even deeper level below the narrative, other forces are at work.
When the boys drink to much and are vomiting their hearts out: "In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool".
When lying in pain at night in the desert "He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits".
Describing nature after a storm: "The horses stepped archly among the shadows that fell over the road, the bracken steamed. Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on. The sun rose up in the sky and the country took on a new color, green fire in the acacia and paloverde and green in the roadside run-off grass and fire in the ocotillo. As if the rain were electric, had grounded circuits that the electric might be".
Or deep insights into the nature of horses: "Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were".
Or ranchers' truths: "There were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to man".
Talking about the very poor Mexican children: "Their intelligence was frightening. And they had a freedom which we envied. There were so few restraints upon them. So few expectations. Then at the age of eleven or twelve they would cease being children. They lost their childhood overnight and they had no youth. They became very serious. As if some terrible truth had been visited upon them. Some terrible vision. At a certain points in their lives they were sobered in an instant and I was puzzled by this but of course I could not know what it was they saw. What it was they knew".
It is a western, with cowboys and horses, with a simple narrative that you read like a real page-turner, but don't go too fast. Cherish McCarthy's wonderful characters, and appreciate that below his style a whole world is lurking, poking holes in the surface fabric.
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