ABAW (or three): Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy, Alfred A. Knopf 1992 (via Picador paperback 2010).

McCarthy’s writing intimidates me. It demands attention to read and it demonstrates a finely tuned attention to the essential details of objects, places, and people. McCarthy’s ascetic attitude toward technology and publicity is also manifest. He clearly weighs every word in these stories that often feel more like tense, tightly wound poetry. 

I don’t know if I completely understood the meaning of the stories. They haunt me though, coming back to me again and again in the two months since I read them. And the ending of the final book still irritates me. 

All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, a teenager with a talent for training horses who wants to be a cowboy. But the world is changing. His grandfather has died, his mother has sold the family’s ranch. So John Grady sets off to Mexico to slow down time and find a place where a ranching life still exists. He finds trouble in the form of another wandering boy and a rancher’s daughter. In spite of the pain and the ugliness, John Grady always tries to do what’s right. The Badlands of Mexico don’t change that in him.

The Crossing is the story of Billy Parham, another teenage cowboy, this time in New Mexico. Billy’s life takes a strange turn as he follows trap lines to catch a wolf that has wandered up into the mountains out of Mexico. Though he knows she will kill him if she gets a chance, Billy can’t bring himself to kill the wolf once he’s caught her. She is an anachronism, and he decides to try to lead her back to her home range in Mexico. We are reminded repeatedly how dangerous and crazy Billy’s idea is. Early on, his character is almost indistinguishable from John Grady, chasing a philosophy of doing what is right at all costs to himself. Billy and his wolf are captured and he kills her rather than allow her to be a slave in a dog fighting pit. That choice earns him no friends. He returns home to New Mexico to find that his family - except for his younger brother - have been murdered, and their horses stolen. With nowhere else to go, Billy gathers his brother and returns to Mexico to reclaim the horses. Billy’s losses only grow, and he does change, becoming a cynical young man who sees himself as a broken sinner, but who cannot turn away from service to a good man, or to his country in a time of war.

I don’t entirely trust myself to talk about Cities of the Plain because the ending felt so incongruous and trite. The story brings together John Grady and Billy, working together on a dying New Mexico ranch that is about to be swallowed up by the White Sands Missile Range. John Grady is a decorated veteran (the All-American Cowboy, as his buddies half-disdainfully call him behind his back), but Billy’s heart condition kept him (bitterly) out of service. When Billy leads him unwillingly to a brothel, John Grady falls in love again, this time with an epileptic Mexican prostitute named Magdalena. Magdalena’s owner also loves her. Things don’t go so well for the American men when they attempt to rescue Magdalena, but their actions at every turn are consistent with their characters through the entire trilogy. They act on their anguish, their anger, their disdain, and their loyalty to one another to the end. In a way they are brothers, bound by their love for a lifestyle or world view that probably died before they were even born. I was ok up to that point. But the aged homeless wanderings and underpass conversations with a character that might have been Death? That felt too much like ham-fistedly trying to cram a THEME onto a trilogy that had up to that point been more nuanced about potential meaning and symbolism.

Still, McCarthy gives us evocative and stirring imagery of the Southwestern landscape, about plains, horses, and men out of place in their own time.