Customer Reviews

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First: I read the Border Trilogy this week. I haven't read any other McCarthy literature. I was told that if I liked Larry McMurtry, Steinbeck, and Salinger then I would love McCarthy. The first thing I bought was The Crossing. Upon realizing it was part of a trilogy with All The Pretty Horses as the first installment, I was very disappointed. I had no intrest in a Hollywood western novel. But, I grudgingly purchased All The Pretty Horses and read it. (Have not watched movie). That said...

Cormac McCarthy far surpasses any living writer with which I have come in contact. If I had the masterful ability with language that he does, I could express that in a much more emphatic manner.

Any reviewer who complains about things such as puncuation, grammer, or spanish-I feel compelled to respond with this:
1. Would you prefer that all painters created exact duplicates of their subject matter? Are we not better, as a society and as a species, for taking our interpretations further and showing those things we are already intimate with in a fresh or different way? Would you say 'cubism', for instance, is too complicated for you?
2. Are you 25 years old or less? Do you have any true ability to surive in a harsh world without parental aide? The struggles depicted in this novel would, of course, be difficult to fathom in that scenario, especially when teamed with non-traditional grammar and punctuation and a lack of a personal translator.
3. If neither of the two applies to a negative reviewer, perhaps a solution would be ritalin. It is supposed to assist in 'focus'.

On to the review:

All the Pretty Horses is the 'prettiest' of the three. The least bleak, possesses the least darkness. John Grady Cole, loses what he allows himself to lose. He is afforded by McCarthy some level of self determination. He rarely states a prediction that does not become so. He never throws a rope without catching what he intends. Even in the darkest scenes, if John Grady fights for something, he seems to get it.

The Crossing's main character was just the opposite. Billy Parnham will never get anything he for which he fights. He will always align himself most closely with a losing cause. It seems that he is completely asexual, and the closest bonds he forms almost always precede the demise of said character/animal.

There is something striking in the fact that the moral stance, character, sense of justice are nearly identical for John and Billy. Yet John wins, and Billy loses. Repeatedly. Yet it is Billy who survives all contests, all tragedies, all of his closest bonds. Billy's 'heart' is never joined with any group or idea or convention larger than land and animals. At some points his 'heart' is rejected; but is his survival possibly attributed to his lack of truly 'giving' his 'heart' to any passionate cause? The passion Billy gives us in the final scene of The Crossing, the self-realization and anger and utter despairing are so exceedingly rare that your tears are nearly required after finishing this book.
As you might be able to tell, it would take far more than the 1000 word limit to fully explore the metaphors, symbolism, or intentions of McCarthy's characters.

The Cities on the Plain brings the two that abadonded their families in favor of the dust of the road together in this final installment. While personally jostled by Billy's transition from complete and total sorrow (in the conclusion of The Crossing) to the casual, easy going buddy (in the opening of The Cities), that is the only fault worth mentioning.

The theme may or may not be this: We don't know anything and neither does anyone else. The nuggets of wisdom that our heroes encounter from the journeying, extrapolating, strangers they meet are proof of this, and, an indication that these books could be re-read hundreds of times.

The Crossing, in my view, is the strongest of the three, with The Cities of the Plain second and All the Pretty Horses, obviously, third. The Cities of the Plain would be wasted as read without the other two.

Mccarthy's trilogy was eye opening, depressing, and filled me with a new sense of respect for all the cowboys then and now. The books were about self revelations, friendships, differences in cultures, but most of all survival.

The books of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy have been well received individually, and yet none of them has been received well-enough... What we have in these three books are three works of genius, vivid, thrilling, heartbreaking, individual stories of astounding specificity and realism which nevertheless pull larger stories, the story of the American West, the story of unspoiled wilderness, the story of our own national romanticism, along with them.

The protagonists are boys in love with the land, in love with an ascetic live on it, who are forced, through the series of stories, to watch that land change and whither and grow tame and bland. The boys quarrel, fall in love. They are prey to violence, to loss. They are, for the most part, taciturn, and yet McCarthy's extraordinary skill puts meaning into what they do not say, their silences, their gestures.

I have read the first two books twice. I have not re-read the third yet because I have not recovered emotionally. But the reading of that third started a chemical reaction that made it seem as though I had read the first two a third time, and brought a new, fuller meaning to all my literary experiences with the trilogy.

A great stylist, a superb story-teller, a poet, and a profound psychologist, McCarthy is, in my opinion, the best writer in America. I see him viewed and admired, in fifty years, as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald are now. I would like to be one person who gets a jump on this eventuality.

PG

McCarthy is a masterful author. There is no other author who can paint a stark but beautiful vision of what it means to be human and to exist in history. I was first introduced to him in highschool and have since then read every single one of his books. My favorite would be "All the Pretty Horses" followed by "Cities of the Plain". "Blood Meridian" is not in the Trilogy but follows in third.

I never saw the movie, "All the Pretty Horses", because I am an utmost purist. There can be no improvements upon this set of books as a whole and certainly Hollywood should not be the first to try. They are too magnificently crafted for even pictures to begin to create the same world as McCarthy does in his own novels. He is a thoughtful and bleak writer and if "The Old Man in the Sea" got to you, then certainly the Trilogy will.

In many years of reading and writing, I have never read a novel by a contemporary author and then gone out and purchased five other novels of that same guy. And continued to be amazed, novel after novel. Cormac McCarthy is up there with Samuel Beckett as that unusual modern novelist. He dosen't give interviews, do books reviews, teach writing classes; he's isolated, serious, successfully creating an individual world no one ever dared dream of inventing, and where followers would get lost in his wasteland, just as with Beckett. And God does he have language. If "Art is reality seen through a unique perspective", then read this or any of his books. Other novelists seem to be playing it awfully safe compared to him.

I read "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!" and "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Then I read "The Crossing" (my first McCarthy novel and favorite) and "All the Pretty Horses" and "Cities of the Plain." Like the three other works, the Borders Trilogy is sensational to me. The style the prose was executed with naturalness--the long sentences are like thoughts and seems to meander somewhere but unknown, some lost place or location or dream. The text makes you feel there is sense of lost with hard sigh and wish to return the thing that was lost. The text is beautiful because it sometimes complex and long and sometimes short, like human thoughts. I read "The Old Man and the Sea;" compared to the trilogy, the text of "Old Man" is baby talk, so simple as if humans are simple creatures incapable thinking deeply.

Reading this trilogy is a defining experience for anyone who has spent time face to face with the pensive Southwestern border landscape, or for anyone attuned to human solitude in various forms. I am particularly fascinated by the sparse, seemingly inarticulate dialogues. They generate a poetic rhythm rarely found in contemporary literature, a dazzling game of improvization against dark backgrounds. As a musician and immigrant from Europe (at odds with some current literary mannerisms) I find McCarthy's style powerful, pure, and highly stimulating.

The first two novels in The Border Trilogy feature different protagonists and are set roughly a decade apart. Both protagonists: John Grady Cole, in `All the Pretty Horses'; and Billy Parham in `The Crossing', are young cowboys and each travels between the US southwest into northern Mexico. The third novel, `Cities of the Plains', opens in the early 1950s with Cole and Parham together at a ranch in New Mexico, just north of El Paso.

`It was vaquero country and other men's troubles were alien to it and that was about all that could be said.'

Of the three novels, my favourite is `The Crossing': Billy Parham's doomed attempt to take a trapped female wolf `home' to Mexico. Billy's fight to save this wolf is heroic but like so much else in Billy's life does not succeed. In `All the Pretty Horses' John Grady Cole's search to find the owner of Jimmy Blevins's horse is also a doomed quest. And yet, the story itself is a masterpiece and a tribute to a way of life - a culture - fast disappearing. In `Cities of the Plains', the way of life John Cole and Billy Parham are familiar with is coming to an end. The Army will be taking over the land. John has fought - and lost - his own battle to extricate his beloved from her life as a prostitute, and Billy Parham is alone. Again. Or still.

The fates of Billy Parham and John Grady Cole are inescapable. Their existence is simply an infinitesimal part of an infinite whole: the journeyers are less important than their journeys.

`Our privileged view into this one night of this man's history presses upon us the realization that all knowledge is a borrowing and every fact a debt.'

I am haunted by these stories. There is a power in the writing quite separate from the events being described that had me enthralled for hours. And yet there is nothing neat and tidy about the prose, nothing polished and complete about the journey. The people are in most ways far less important than the landscape they occupy and the times they live in - at least in my reading.

`The world was made new each day and it was only men's clinging to its vanished husks that could make of that world one husk more.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Friendship and solitude are heavily explored in this trilogy. Bleak and pretty landscapes are artfully painted and rich characters engage in realistic dialogue and relationships. Two friends set out to find themselves in the bleak Western USA landscape. Along the way they have near brushes with death, from clashes with the law to the forces of nature. They travel to Mexico where they find work on a horse farm and observe the rich farm owner's struggle for status and power. Both men grow up quickly as circumstances force them to face the facts that they may not ever realize their own dreams and that life is unfair to all.

Cormac McCarthy presents three tales about his young protagonists, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, in this trilogy of coming-of-age novels. By the time the third novel ends, with a somewhat unsatisfactory fast forward jump across nearly five decades, one's nerves and emotions are practically wrung out.

These two young men, each traveling through the Southwest on quests that conjure up perils matching those Odysseus faced, are forced into choices with graver consequences than either can foresee. Their independent quests, which form the basis of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, intertwine in Cities of the Plain. Death is no stranger in any of the three books, but by the end of Cities on the Plain, it is irrelevant.

Though much has been written about the two central characters and their fates, in my view, McCarthy tends to amplify his characters more than he develops them for there is a sameness to each from start to end more in keeping with archetypes than real people.

McCarthy will build the tension to an almost maddening level at times, relying on vivid, detailed depictions of the now lost Southwest to slow the momentum. At times I felt like I was waiting for an iceberg to scuttle my ship: I could see its slow approach but could not forestall the inevitable. The layers and layers of description finely permeate your consciousness so that the clouds of dust, the smell of sweaty horses, the ache from a knife puncture, cold rain sliding under the collar down the spine take on the vividness usually imparted more powerfully by poetry than prose.

Sometimes, I must confess, the clipped style of the conversations and stacks of similes bothered me a bit because of what was not being said or shown but what lurked unstated like those half-formed thoughts we all harbor.

Yet writing with this level of detail about the land, the weather, the loneliness of souls on a quest, can take its toll and for all the pleasure these books bring, I must confess that I was not sorry to close the cover and shelve this book. Maybe I'll revisit it in 20 years; regardless, these characters are forever seared in my consciousness.