In this final volume of The Border Trilogy, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, in the still point between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing or already changed beyond recognition.In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham–nine years apart in age, yet with a kinship greater than … kinship greater than perhaps they know–are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north, at Alamogordo, by the military. To the south, always on the horizon are the mountains of Mexico, looming over El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and all the cities of the plain.
Bound by nature to horses and cattle and range, these two discover that ranchlife domesticity is compromised, for them and the men they work with, by a geometry of loss afflicting old and young alike, those who have survived it and anyone about to try. And what draws one of them across the border again and again, what would bind “those disparate but fragile worlds,” is a girl seized by ill fortune, and a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.
This story of friendship and passion is enfolded in a narrative replete with character and place and event–a blind musician, a marauding pack of dogs, curio shops and ancient petroglyphs, a precocious shoe-shine boy, trail drives from the century before, midnight on the highway–and with landforms and wildlife and horses and men, most of all men and the women they love and mourn, men and their persistence and memories and dreams.
With the terrible beauty of Cities of the Plain–with its magisterial prose, humor both wry and out-right, fierce conviction and unwavering humanity–Cormac McCarthy has completed a landmark of our literature and times, an epic that reaches from tales of the old west, the world past, into the new millennium, the world to come.
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This the third book of the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy. These are my favorite of McCarthy’s oeuvre. They are each masterful and stunning prose. I can’t say why I read All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing many years ago, and then did not read Cities of the Plain until now. I adore Cormac McCarthy’s writing. It is vivid, raw, and lush. Please be sure to read the epigraph. It is beautiful and awesome. The philosophy spills, thick and prophetic, like the blood of the story.
Some quotes, but there are too many gorgeous extracts to put here:
“Our waking life’s desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty. All in our custody seethes with an inner restlessness. But in dreams we stand in this great democracy of the possible and there we are right pilgrims indeed. There we go forth to meet what we shall meet.”
“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”
“Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternate and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life.”
Loved it! Absolutely. I do think Billy was somewhat marginalized for the sake of John’s story. He was more of a sidekick than a co-lead. But I loved what he added. Who writes dialog like CM? Nobody. I’d have to say All the Pretty Horses was my favorite in the trilogy, but this installment comes in second. Great read!
The Border Trilogy closes. Excellent series.
Cities of the Plain is the third novel in McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. It brings together the protagonists from each of the previous two volumes. John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses is now nineteen years old and nine years the junior of Billy Parham from The Crossing. Regardless of the disparity in their ages, the men share an inseparable friendship and a deep passion for riding horses and living off the land. They work as ranch hands for a respected landowner on his farm not far from the Mexican border. When John Grady tumbles helplessly in love with a sixteen-year-old Mexican prostitute from across the border, he provokes the ire of the girl’s pimp. John’s relentless desire to marry the girl leads him down a dangerous and fateful path. Billy’s attempts to protect his friend draw him into the violent turmoil where there is no turning back. As McCarthy does throughout volumes one and two of the trilogy, he makes the landscape and the characters who endure the rugged terrain as important an aspect of his writing as the story. The narrative stretches in many directions with keen insight about life on the ranch, but in the scenes that brim with action and tension, no writer is more adept at description and nuance than McCarthy. This is an admirable conclusion to an amazing trilogy. Anyone who wants to gain the full vision of McCarthy’s work will want to read all three volumes.
Most of this novel is a pleasant romantic adventure featuring the protagonists of McCarthy’s first two novels, with perhaps a few touching callbacks to the other two thirds of The Border Trilogy. It’s okay, but feels kind of slight compared to the other novels. Then there’s the last section which is completely devastating. This is probably only essential to someone like me who already loves the other two books in this trilogy.