Customer Reviews

The Border Trilogy

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Here are three amazing books, and one amazing saga, all together in one brimming volume you can throw into a backpack.

The first novel, "All the Pretty Horses" is one of the most beautifully told stories I've ever read. Not only is the writing here packed with imagery, and the story one of McCarthy's most accessible, but the textures of the words used to describe the images are as lush and as enfolding as anything F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote--even when McCarthy's describing the driest of desert plains, the most desolate of ruins, or the emptiest of lives.

The book tells the story of two young friends who leave home in 1948 Texas to ride south into northern Mexico in search of SOMETHING. What happens along the way is tragic and amusing, lovely and gripping, real and amazing. McCarthy seems to paint every scene perfectly, yet he does so using the fewest amount of words possible, and the simplest of details.

"The gray and malignant dawn." "Stars falling down the long black slope of the firmament." "The shelving clouds." "Their windtattered fire." "Narrow spires of smoke standing vertically into the windless dawn so still the village seemed to hang by threads from the darkness."

Long sentences shroud the reader in the events of every scene, and the author's trademark quote-sign-less dialogue gives every conversation a very biblical feel.

The trilogy's second book, "The Crossing" has only thematic and geographical elements in common with the first. The story deals with a completely different character, Billy Parham, a son in a late-1930s New Mexican ranching family. Billy traps a wolf that has been killing his father's cattle but realizes he morally can't kill it and has to return it to its home in the mountains of old Mexico. Billy crosses the border into Mexico, and as he does he crosses from real life into a world of dreams, where everyone moves as if the air was liquid, where every ruin has an irretrievable story, where soot and heat and danger hang in the air, and where nothing ever goes as planned.

The story is not as streamlined or as focused as its thematic predecessor, "All the Pretty Horses," but that's not necessarily a shortcoming. The book sprawls out like a wide hot desert--curling north and south, east and west, across the present and into the past. The writing is as good as any writing I've ever read ever, and certain metaphors and feelings will stay with you for years. For example: the coals of a campfire seeming like an exposed piece of the core of the earth.

The trilogy's concluding part is "Cities of the Plain." The book has some shortcomings, but it's still one amazing piece of work. YOU try writing something this good.

In this book, John Grady Cole--the genius horsetrainer of "All the Pretty Horses"--and Billy Parham--the kindhearted nomad of "The Crossing"--come together as ranch hands on a New Mexico estancia. Here, you can see why this actually is a trilogy. Both characters are older than they were in the previous books--Billy much older--but both are kindred spirits whose stories connect with and affect each another.

"Cities of the Plain" tends more heavily toward the lengthy philosophical monologues that appear only occasionally in the trilogy's earlier volumes, and the whole story at moments goes a little bit long if you've just read the two previous books right before.

However, the writing is gorgeous, and haunting. In one passage, a dead calf's "ribcage lay with curved tines upturned on the gravel plain like some carnivorous plant brooding in the barren dawn." Yeah. Yeah!

And the ending--the ending is amazing. It might not be quite what you expect or ask for, but it is thrilling in its perfectness, in its completess, in how true it feels. It gave me chills of ecstasy. It left me holding the book like a priceless religious relic, re-reading its back cover, flipping back through it to parts I had marked, reluctant and unwilling to let go of these characters or their world.

Reading these collected books is like having a vision: I feel as if I should tell the world about it, but at the same time it seems so sacred and personal that maybe I should just keep it to myself and try to figure out why it came to me, into my life, into my head. These are books that deserve readers. Pick this volume up, and let it seep into your skin, let it open you to other worlds and people and ideas, and let it change you. Let it open your eyes to the world, and to the West, and to the goodness and the hope and the sadness that haunts the lives of all of us.

This is a saga made up of all those ineffable things that most of us just can't put into words. But here, somehow, Cormac McCarthy has managed to do just that. Here is the intangible, but tangible. Here is the unnameable, but named. Here are the thoughts you could never express, expressed. Here is a book worth reading, a book that will change you--you, and the way you see the world.

These three novels should establish Cormac McCarthy as a worthy inheritor of the mantle worn by William Faulkner. The first, All The Pretty Horses is probably the best because it introduces John Grady Cole, who should join the ranks of legendary fictional heroes. His story is concluded in Cities of the Plain the last of the trilogy which contains an account of a knife fight that is almost unbearable in it intensity. The second novel,The Crossing is in my opinion, the weakest of the three,although the first 100 or so pages which describe the relationship between a boy and a wolf he has trapped is as good as anything in the trilogy. McCarthys description of ranch life on the New Mexico-Mexico border in the 1940s and early '50s is so pure that one can almost feel the icy wind as it cuts through the characters as they ride south to meet their fate in old Mexico. This is a great book and Cormac McCarthy is among the greatest novelists of our time.

I've read the entire Border Trilogy at least three times now, and I've read each of McCarthy's other novels at least once. Now, I'm dying to see what he writes next.

The language is lyrical and poetic, sometimes short and choppy in the language of McCarthy's young cowboy protagonists, sometimes long and surreal in his descriptions of horses, landscape, and dreams. The language finally emerges as a living character of the novel, equally shaping the narrative and its power, separate from the plot line and journey motif.

His storytelling ability is unmatched as he weaves storytelling characters into the bildungsromanesque journeys of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. These interlocutors relate intricate stories that allow us to witness tales being both told and witnessed, creating a double effect on us through our connectivity to the characters. McCarthy uses his own wonderful narrative to reflect on the power of the narrative event and the act of storytelling. He truly raises the standard for today's writers, for not only does his language transcend the pitter-patter of most so-called literature, his ability to weave marvelous stories and reflect on his role as narrator makes him a writer worth reckoning with. In fact, I just completed a thesis based on this set of three novels for my MA in English at BYU. Read them in order, or read them separately, "All the Pretty Horses" will draw you in with its sometimes intense sometimes comical language and bloody violence. "The Crossin" will captivate you in its complexity and depth, as well as its realistic, terribly moving portrayal of a young man alone and lonely. Finally, "Cities of the Plain" will make you laugh and cry as the protagonists are brought together in a domestic setting and move toward their destinies, each preset by McCarthy himself.

Read everything he has written. You will ache for more.

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

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.

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.

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.

This set of novels is an unbelievable adventure with characters that are finely drawn. I do not know how anyone could walk away from this set and not love John Grady Cole. He is an American folk hero of outstanding proportions. The author's use of language is a thing of beauty. Everyone should read these novels.

It was a privilege to read each volume of the Trilogy as it was published. Taken individually, each book has its strengths and weaknesses -- I find "All the Pretty Horses" the most even and satisfying, "The Crossing" the richest and most profound, "Cities of the Plain" a little less than either, except for its Epilogue -- but as a whole, it stands as one of the 20th century's last great masterpieces and I daresay an entry into the much-maligned but still useful "Canon" of Western literature. Taken as a whole, the structure and symbology of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham become coherent, and challenging, acquiring additional impact. I still think and will always think John Grady and Billy the two greatest heroes I've read in the postmodern world -- not that they were original, but because they weren't. Thinking about whose stories they echo is one of the deepest pleasures of the Border Trilogy.

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.