A review by tasmanian_bibliophile
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
‘Things separate from their stories have no meaning.’
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
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