In his fiction, the author of “All the Pretty Horses” grasped and dramatised an essential truth: that the American West was won with violence
is the bard of the American South. Saul Bellow is the supreme chronicler of Chicago. New York is contested territory. For a long time, Wallace Stegner could have laid claim to the West. But that was before Cormac McCarthy hit his stride., you need to know the land and its beautiful, terrifying expanse, as Stegner did. But in his fiction Mr McCarthy, who died on June 13th at the age of 89, grasped and dramatised another essential truth: that the West was won with violence.
He gained fame with his “Border trilogy”: “All the Pretty Horses” , “The Crossing” and “Cities of the Plain”. Like all his fiction these were demanding stories, but they won him a wider readership, especially “All the Pretty Horses”. Elegant and well plotted, it was made into a film starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz at the start of their careers. The best book in the trilogy was the last.
Mr McCarthy based the book in part on the real-life Glanton Gang, scalp-hunters who haunted what is now Sonora, New Mexico, and bits of Arizona. It features one of literature’s most pitiless and vibrant depictions of vice, in the form of a quasi-mythical character, fat and hairless, who becomes the novel’s amoral centre. Its plot is relentlessly violent, the language almost biblical. Finishing it takes determination; at times it seems perversely intent on persuading readers to give up.
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