Despite its title, Cormac McCarthy’s 'All The Pretty Horses' explores many less-than-pretty themes: the loss of childhood, the crossing of geographical and moral boundaries, the suppression of women, the apparent disconnect between sublime landscape and intense violence, our treatment of animals, and the fall of the ‘western.’

Although there are flashes of sudden cruelty – a child execution, a knife fight in a prison, bursts of manic gunfire – 'All The Pretty Horses' tends to trot forward in a very controlled manner. Childhood, love, and family all inevitably crumble, but they crumble so slowly that youthful humour, romantic hope, and the human heart are all given ample time to speak… and when they do speak, their voices resonate loudly and clearly.

In part, these voices resonate so loudly and so clearly because they are projected on a stage beset with a deep sense of stasis. To read 'All The Pretty Horses' is to become embedded in a quiescent background, to sense a kind of slowness-behind-all-movement which is summoned through re-iteration (“they rode on” becomes a mantra), re-presentations of wide open spaces, re-collections of history, and the re-occurrence of liminal states: horses stepping through shadows, tiny birds impaled on cholla, chess pieces fixed on a board, consciousness suspended within a dream, the world confronted as unspeakable resonance, and a protagonist who re-turns to his point of departure.

This soundtrack touches some of these themes – the circularity of journeys, the bitter-sweet loss of innocence, the expansion and contraction of space, the liminality of mental states, and our sense that everything, including language, is slowly walking out on us – while time buzzes, almost motionless, under sun-baked horizons.

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Cover art by kind permission of Mark Gleason:

www.markgleason.org