Four stars.
This one’s a bildungsroman about a teenager (I believe he’s sixteen when the story starts) named John Grady Cole, who lives in Texas with his deteriorating family. Cole intends to continue working in the family farm and doing something in particular with it, legacy-like, but after his grandfather dies, the house changes hands in ways I wasn’t entirely sure about, but that in any case destroy Cole’s intended future. So, partly as a fuck y’all, he grabs his friend, a couple of horses, and heads down to Mexico, intending to never return.
Cole is a good kid. Intelligent, with a strong moral compass. It just happens that he’s venturing into the wild, and his courage and moral compass are going to get considerably tested. First of all, the pair of friends find themselves followed on their journey south by a single rider. That rider turns out to be a supposedly thirteen-year-old runaway named Jimmy Blevins, likely a fake name. He may have stolen his horse. Although the kid seems a bit unhinged and generally immature, he proves his skill with a revolver by punching through Cole’s friend’s wallet in one shot. Later on, this kid, terrified of storms (he mentioned that getting struck by lightning was a bit of a family curse), ends up losing his clothes, his horse, and his gun. In a Mexican town, they spot both Blevins’ horse and his gun in other people’s possession, which Blevins won’t allow.
That’s where the main trouble starts, which has repercussions for the rest of the story. At its core, though, this story is a tale of tragic love between John Grady Cole and a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl named Alejandra, of Spanish ancestry and a wealthy family. John is ultimately a Texan cowboy with barely a peso to his name, not the kind of young man that Alejandra’s father would allow his precious daughter to marry.
Cole learns that the world is a harsh, frequently unfair world, and that the lines between good and evil are hard to measure at times. This is the first entry in McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy, and I’m curious to know how Cole dealt later on with the mental state that the events of the first book left him in.
I must mention, as I have in every review of McCarthy’s work ever since I learned about this matter, that the tale I’m reviewing, as well as most other tales of his ever since the following events happened, are heavily influenced by having met in the early seventies someone that quickly became McCarthy’s love of his life: a thirteen-year-old blonde, blue-eyed teenager named Augusta Britt. Or, as one of his writer pals put it, “a teenage popsy.”
Supposedly, as McCarthy was researching Blood Meridian in Tucson, AZ, Augusta Britt, wearing a holstered gun, asked McCarthy to sign her copy of his first book. Although that sounds unlikely (partly because the supposed edition she handed him lacked a photo of the author), Britt has showed the letters she received from McCarthy. Britt was a foster kid, and had been abused in various ways; all the foster homes she ended up in lacked locks in the doors, and men tended to enter whenever they pleased. McCarthy quickly grew amorous of this thirteen-year-old tragic hottie, and after she told him that someone in her current foster home had hit her, he offered her to run away together to Mexico.
What he intended to do was very illegal: basically kidnapping a girl from the foster system. Crossing not only state but country lines with an underage girl that he was in love with and likely fully intended to fuck was probably also illegal. But it happened, and by the time she was fourteen and in Mexico, McCarthy and Britt banged like there was no tomorrow, which McCarthy likely believed to be the case, as the FBI was literally after him. Even to this day, Britt says that the whole thing was fine, that she loved him and felt safe with him. But their relationship fell apart when Britt found out that McCarthy was actually married at the time (although estranged), and had a son he was neglecting. Britt ended up leaving for the States, which broke McCarthy’s black heart. They remained friends until his death, and he even tried to marry her twice, but ended up failing to do so because her church demanded of him to convert to Christianity; as the last paragraph of his last book, The Passenger, put it, he was “the last pagan on earth,” and very much intended to remain so.
You feel echoes of that period of McCarthy’s life in this novel: running away to Mexico, the dread of being pursued, the dilemmas about right and wrong, the tragic love for a teenage girl, etc. Curiously, Jimmy Blevins, the wild thirteen-year-old runaway kid, seems the closest to Augusta Britt given what I read about her: the kid had peculiar mannerisms and a wild goofiness that you could imagine having been lifted straight from a seventies teenage runaway with a fucked-up past.
I wasn’t particularly into the story, to be honest. Didn’t connect much with it other than during some philosophical passages. If it weren’t for McCarthy’s prose, at times I would have rated it a three. However, prose-wise, it was sloppier and much lazier than Suttree, which was my previous read of his. I can’t blame McCarthy for lowering the quality of his prose; Suttree was so relentlessly high quality at times that writing it must have been agonizing, prone to making the writer hate the very process. I suppose that in the back of his mind, McCarthy thought that the public at large would have been forced to acknowledge the brilliance of Suttree, but it ended up selling terribly. I can see him thinking, “Why bother?” and not putting in his 110% from then on.
Anyway, the following are the quotes I’ve highlighted from the book.
People dont feel safe no more, he said. We’re like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We dont know what’s goin to show up here come daylight. We dont even know what color they’ll be.
Beware gentle knight. There is no greater monster than reason.
The prison was no more than a small walled village and within it occurred a constant seethe of barter and exchange in everything from radios and blankets down to matches and buttons and shoenails and within this bartering ran a constant struggle for status and position. Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian absolute every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill.
Those who have suffered great pain of injury or loss are joined to one another with bonds of a special authority and so it has proved to be. The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.
We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God—who knows all that can be known—seems powerless to change.
He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe it would ever leave.
He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. 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.
He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.
He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activities in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.
He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother’s uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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