I finally finished Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy the other day when I turned the last page on Cities of the Plain. I had put off reading the final book for a while, mainly because I had heard it was the darkest – and, after reading Blood Meridian a couple of years back, I knew how dark “dark” can be with McCarthy.
Many fans of The Road (myself included) likely appreciate the newly scaled back prose style that McCarthy has developed, eschewing the philosophical wanderings and twangy Faulknerisms of his earlier books. Some of his superficial quirks persist though: apostrophes rarely make an appearance; same with commas. Sometimes, in a group scene, you have no idea who’s talking to whom because the dialogue mostly goes unattributed and pretty much all of it sounds the same.
While the three “Border” books display the maturation of his formal style, the real evolution belongs to the ideas, characters and storylines upon which McCarthy fixates. Those familiar with the books that come after this trilogy might see the linear progression of his perspective, from that of a man who sees a great change coming (as shown in these books), to one who’s living in it and is confused by it (No Country), to one who is experiencing the apocalyptic fallout of it (The Road).
But before I get too far, here’s how the series shapes up for those unfamiliar with it:
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
John Grady Cole, a stubborn teenage cowboy, has a special connection to horses. After being evicted from his property, he finds work at a Mexican ranch where he falls in love with the owner’s daughter and, not knowing when to say when, is sent to a violent prison by corrupt authorities.
The Crossing (1994)
Another stubborn teenage cowboy, Billy Parham, has a special connection to nature. He decides to repatriate a Mexican wolf that has been killing his family’s cattle, but when he comes back he discovers a violent incident has occurred at his home ranch (no spoilers here!). He turns back to Mexico to exact his revenge, racking up some odd bonding experiences with nature along the way.
Cities of the Plain (1998)
Both teenage cowboys are working together on a ranch. John Grady falls in love with a young, epileptic Mexican prostitute whose pimp loves her too much to let her go.
The accessibility and grounded nature of the story in All the Pretty Horses falls on its face in The Crossing, the trilogy’s slowest book. Then it picks back up in Cities of the Plain, only to jump off a cliff in the drawn-out philosophical passages in the Epilogue.
My theory? It’s all in the character design. John Grady Cole is a young romantic whose sole purpose in life is to find “the one”. What makes him a hero worth rooting for (and worth reading about) is his total inability to let things go. If he’s in love, dammit, that’s how things are gonna be, so the world better bend to his will.
Billy Parham, on the other hand, is pretty much a West coast hippie trussed up in a tough cowboy exterior. When he’s at the helm of the story (as in The Crossing and in parts of Cities), things don’t seem as urgent because he is more at peace with the world around him than John Grady is — even when that same world is trying to destroy him.
That said, it’s worth slogging through the occasional pedantic patch of text to finish the trilogy because, from a few steps back, you can see traits common to all three books that sketch out the rough features of the thrust of McCarthy’s work of this era.
This way of life is disappearing. The horse ranch is going the way of the buffalo. McCarthy stresses this in a delicate but persistent way, ruthlessly taking away any sense of home these characters might’ve had. What’s worse is that there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can do to stop the impending change. It’s coming, so y’all better deal with it.
The “good” ones are always governed by a strict moral code, no matter how skewed those morals might be. A character can be extremely violent in the name of righteous vengeance, but chances are they’re going to suffer a lot first. The message? Doing what’s right ain’t easy, but it’s got to be done, so do it. That’s what being a man is all about.
Love is a verdict. Mostly relevant to John Grady’s storylines, McCarthy portrays young love as a kind of binding contract you fall into rather than a feeling shared between two people. In this world, love is something you pay for in the end (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Old timers know best. In No Country for Old Men, McCarthy perfected his way of venerating “old timer wisdom,” as if those who have come before us have something indefinable and increasingly important to share — if we just shut up long enough to ask them their thoughts. That same quality exists throughout these books, but mostly in Cities of the Plain. The world that came before is being lost and it seems like only these few young cowboys are interested in it… although they’re not actively struggling against the change though. They are victims of a greater plot, more concerned with their day-to-day lives than the big picture.
So, should you read the Border Trilogy?
I’m not going to pitch you on why you should read these books. Chances are, if you’ve made it this far in the post, you’ve either already read them, you’re already interested in reading them and haven’t yet, or you’re a family member of mine looking for spelling mistakes.
What I will say is that I’m glad to have made it through all three. To me, McCarthy represents the type of writer that’s being lost in today’s publishing industry. The kind who doesn’t care about interviews or social media, but only about their work — which, really, should do all the talking anyway.
When that kind of writer spends the better part of a decade (or, likely, much more) trying to articulate a narrative vision as McCarthy has done here, I’d like to think it’s worth a little bit of reader’s sweat.
