In 1993 and 1994 the first two installments of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy" appeared. "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing" quietly astounded thousands of readers with their gorgeous-mythic prose style and epic plots. There was no denying the power of McCarthy's vision of a mid-century Southwest populated by heroic cowboys, unbreakable horses and Mexican beauties, and dotted by cattle ranches doomed by the march of time to fade into the creosote landscape.
"Cities of the Plain," the third book of the trilogy, finds laconic young cowboys John Grady Cole, the hero of "All the Pretty Horses," and Billy Parham, the hero of "The Crossing," working together on a ranch in New Mexico in 1952. It's more than a decade since Parham was last seen at the end of "The Crossing" and three years since John Grady Cole's return from his Mexican adventures in "All the Pretty Horses." The world as the two cowboys know it is unraveling. The ranch on which they work soon will be appropriated by the army. The family of cowboys there - the only family either man knows - will soon be disbanded. Parham is Cole's senior by nine years, but something keeps them watchful of each other and quietly binds them.
Love sets the plot in motion when Grady Cole spots a teenage prostitute in a Mexican whorehouse. Despite Billy's warning of the trouble he'll find himself in, Grady Cole pursues the girl with the single-mindedness that defines his character. McCarthy's words are grand, and they flow with an astonishing lucidity. When a character is wounded and lies bleeding, he feels his soul standing "tentatively at the door of his corporeal self. Like some light-footed animal that stood testing the air at the open door of a cage."
As in other McCarthy novels, female characters are not as well fleshed-out as male characters, and as a result the love won and tragically lost in "Cities of the Plain" is less powerful than it could be. But the entwined story of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham is ultimately a resounding success as a conclusion to the trilogy and further confirms McCarthy's status as one of America's finest prose stylists.
(Patrick Lohier)
- Cities of the Plain
copyright 1998 New City Communications, Inc.