Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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Cormac McCarthy has finally completed his Border Trilogy, answering the question of what the first two books, each with an entirely different set of characters, have in common. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, the protagonists of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, respectively, meet up on a ranch in New Mexico. Cities of the Plain may have both of Cormac McCarthy's young hero-cowboys, but it is notable for everything it is missing.

Don't worry, the violence is still there. Over the course of his seven previous novels, McCarthy has worked out a bloody history of the West that is viscerally painful to read. The innovation of the Border Trilogy has been to make this violence secondary, viewed through the eyes of sympathetic protagonists with whom readers can identify.

In the National Book Award-winning novel, All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy opened the trilogy with John Grady Cole, a disinherited sixteen-year-old who rides out of Texas into Mexico with his best friend. He goes to work on a ranch where he falls in love with the owner's daughter, is tortured by a Mexican police chief, thrown in jail, shot, and finally returns to Texas without the girl.

The second novel, The Crossing, reads as a dream-like reworking of the major plot elements of the first novel: John Grady and his best friend are replaced by two young brothers whose parents are murdered and who ride into Mexico to recover their stolen horses. Billy, the older brother, watches as his brother kills a police chief and becomes a revolutionary hero. Their journey is no less violent than John Grady's; it is enough to say that Billy returns to the United States dragging a skeleton.

In Cities of the Plain, one of the first things the reader notices in getting Billy and John Grady side by side, in conversation with each other, is how different they are. In The Crossing Billy seemed a double for John Grady; another stoic cowboy who had an uncanny understanding of animals (horses in John Grady's case, wolves in Billy's), joked in McCarthy's brilliant jabs, and led his companions.

We realize now, however, that Billy's journey into Mexico has made him more remote, whereas John Grady is as stubborn as ever, ready to make the same mistakes and defend them all over again. By the end of the first scene of Cities of the Plain, John Grady is on his way to falling in love again, this time with an epileptic Mexican prostitute. Despite his horrific experiences in Mexico, John Grady is still a romantic, and wants nothing less than to marry Magdalena and build a house for them out on the plain. Unfortunately, Magdalena's pimp has strong feelings about her, too, and John Grady must enlist Billy to help him.

The beauty of the earlier novels lies in McCarthy's theology. The road for McCarthy is stocked with hermits and blind men, fortune-tellers and gypsies. Throughout their journeys, both John Grady and Billy encounter marvelous story-tellers who speculate on the nature of the world and question the traditional religious roles of God.

The most eloquent of these story-tellers, a former Catholic priest, appears in The Crossing. He tells of a man who escaped one earthquake as a child only to lose his wife and son in a second. In his old age, the man installs himself beneath a ruined church dome, challenging God to kill him.

His experience in speaking to the old man leads the priest on his own search for God. "I thought there might be evidence that had been overlooked," says the priest. "I thought He would not trouble himself to wipe away every handprint. My desire to know was strong. I thought it might even amuse Him to leave some clue."

But in Cities of the Plain there are no priests or prophesying Indians. In fact, there is no road; the only crossing in this novel is the trek the cowboys make after work to get to a Mexican whorehouse. With the road disappears all the theological speculation: if in the first two novels it seems that God stepped out of the world only moments before, leaving behind a cult of agnostics searching for Him, this final novel is a landscape of uninterested atheists. The sense of God as an active, violent force in the world of nature is gone. Instead, we have a ranch of cowboys who wake up before dawn to herd cattle, rebuild fences, ride down wolves, and spend their money on hard liquor and prostitutes.

Which is fine: the novel is filled with truly funny (if unphilosophical) conversations among the ranch-hands as only Cormac McCarthy could give us. When John Grady asks Billy to help him get Magdalena out of the whorehouse, Billy asks:

"What in the goddamn hell would you do with her if you did get her away from down there? Which you aint.

Marry her.

Billy paused and put the cigarette halfway to his mouth. He put it down again.

Well that's it. That's it. I'm having your ass committed.

Will you help me?

No and hell no. Do you know what they're going to do with you? They're going to hook your head up to one of them machines and throw a big switch and fry your brains to where you wont be a menace to yourself no more."

All the detailed descriptions of the cowboys' work and bantering are easy for McCarthy, but it is not everything that he is capable of. In the first two novels of the trilogy, he had been working out a complicated theory of a single story that encompasses every plot that man can generate. It seemed that McCarthy was going to draw this all together in some way in the final novel of the trilogy. Other than an esoteric recounting of a dream-within-a-dream at the end of the novel, McCarthy seems to have abandoned the story-telling project altogether.

On the other hand, McCarthy's message may be that the story of boy meets and loses girl is the most simple there is. It's certainly no less interesting coming from Cormac McCarthy than, say, Eric Segal or Emily Bronte. But after providing so much for us to ponder on our previous journeys through his literary world, McCarthy leaves us with little more than an entertaining story.