There have been hard years between my father and I, we didn’t talk much for a few of them. My father and I lift our pints at the Glasgow hotel and wait for the family we’ve never known.

Like a medieval fool he’s a harbinger of life’s vicissitudes – of chance, damage and danger. Blevins rides a big bay horse, which is probably stolen and is then stolen from him along with his pistol. Along the road they meet Jimmy Blevins, a chaotic, criminally unpredictable child travelling under the alias of a popular radio preacher. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride down to Mexico to seek the vanishing world to which they belong. As the family lawyer puts it: “Son, not everybody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven.” His actress mother has been waiting for the old man to die to sell up. Turned out from his dead grandfather’s cattle ranch at the end of the 40s, Cole’s certainty of a life lived like his forefathers meets implacable obstruction. It’s a western archetype, seen everywhere from the old heroes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove to Elmore Leonard’s recontextualised Raylan Givens in Justified.īut Cole is no flat white hat and this no horse opera: it’s a rite of passage story which does not lead toward the light. In John Grady Cole, McCarthy writes every father’s secretly wished-for son: a gentle, principled and courageous man, who does right by his own conscience even though it may lead to destruction. Two decades later I hear the book on its own terms. I’d imagined I bore a flattering likeness to the young protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. I pack a bag for a week, the longest I’ve spent with him in 30 years.Īs I’m leaving the house, I pick up a book I read while living in Spain in my early 20s. My father waited almost 20 years after his adopted mother died before deciding this year, at 70, to seek his birth family.

Mccarthy all the pretty horses