The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library)

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.


Over the Border   May 28, 2001
Peter Grudin (Stamford, VT USA)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful

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


Hemingway gets even more depressed...   June 18, 2002
16 out of 17 found this review helpful

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.