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I got this because I enjoyed The Road, also by Cormac McCarthy. I must say I’m not a Cowboy and Western kind of gal and the people in this book really do say things like ‘hell, fire, and damnation’, ‘I aint never’, ‘bud’, and ‘I done been’. But wouldn’t ya’ll know it, by the end of this here book, I was jes ’bout fixin’ to put them spurs on meself

During the first 30 pages of this book I was at times confused and even bored but when John Grady Cole and his friend Rawlins finally get started on their journey from Texas to Mexico, things started to get much more interesting. There is something basic and gripping about the theme of survival and McCarthy knows so well how to tap it

McCarthy’s language is shining, simple, and effortless. He is so in charge of what he’s doing that he doesn’t particularly care if a sentence contains eleven ‘ands’ because it feels right that way and so that’s how it’s going to be. Here are some beautifully turned sentences, picked at random:

They were attended by a pack of greyhound dogs and the dogs were lean and silver in colour and they flowed among the legs of the horses silent and fluid as running mercury and the horses paid them no mind at all. (p97-98)

The wild and frantic band of mustangs that had circled the potrero that morning like marbles swirled in a jar could hardly be said to exist and the animals whinnied to one another in the dark and answered back as if some one among their number were missing, or some thing. (p107)

In the sepia monochrome of a rainy day in that lost village they’d grown old instantly. (p284)

I’m definitely up for the next one in this trilogy

PS. It also helps if you either watch Dora the Explorer or, like me, you have a resident Spaniard to translate the small chunks of conversation that are in Spanish in this book