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Pretty Horses Volume 1 of the Border Triology by Cormac McCarthy Volume 1 of the Border Triology with (The Crossing vol 2 and Cities of the Plain : A Novel vol 3). John Cole Grady is a 1930's East Texas teenager, abandoned by his parents' troubles, who sets out with his pal Rawlins to ride across the border to Mexico. Along the way, they pick up an urchin named Blevins and arrive finally at a hacienda, where they're hired to break horses. Grady falls in love with the owner's beautiful daughter--a disaster that leads in succession to arrest and Mexican jail and murder in self-defense. But this clich‚-d plot is not, of course, what one reads a McCarthy novel for. McCarthy is one of the most determined art- prose writers around; and his clean, laconic dialogue is pillowed everywhere with huge gales of imperial style. |
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Crossing Volume 2 of the Border Triology A stunning book, one of the best I have ever devoured--essential reading, highly recommended. McCarthy's National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses (1992) told of young John Grady Cole, a Texas rancher's son who loses his father and his inheritance and strikes out almost aimlessly into Mexico. This sequel is not about Cole or any of his compadres, however, but is instead a parallel story concerning Billy Parham, 16, and his kid brother, Boyd, growing up about 10 years previously on a high desert ranch in southern New Mexico. A vagabond Indian appears who warns the boys of dire events, and then a she-wolf begins pulling down the Parham cattle. Billy ingeniously traps the wolf but cannot bring himself to kill her; almost on a whim, he crosses the border to return her to the distant mountains she came from. When he comes home after months of wandering in the desert, he finds that his parents have been killed by Mexican horse thieves. He and Boyd go after their family's remuda--much as John Grady Cole did in the preceding novel. Boyd is killed, and Billy returns to the U.S., a rootless, restless young man with an uncertain future. At the heart of The Crossing is a pitiless religious inquiry, exemplified in the long story of a failed priest whom Billy meets in an abandoned mining town. This heretic offers a critique of the mind of God that Billy absorbs and, finally, serves to illustrate. A disquieting sequel, though told in high style and with a mournful humor, and McCarthy's insistent use of Spanish dialogue adds a distinctively southwestern, almost romantic flair. |
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| Cities of
the Plain : A Novel Volume 3 of the Border Triology This story brings together the heroes of the first two volumes of the Border Triology (All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing). John Grady, a pensive cowboy and brilliant horseman working a ranch in southeastern Texas in the early 1950s. On the ranch, John Grady joins up with Billy Parham, and the two form an abiding friendship. Though Parham is much more a realist, he finds himself drawn further into Grady's dreams, namely a beautiful teenaged Mexican whore whom John Grady is determined to release from bondage and to marry. Through physical injuries, personal trauma, and many dangerous trips across the Mexican border, the two young men struggle to do what they think will make things right. A full cast of cowboys, landowners, barkeeps, pimps, and desperate whores set the stage for the final curtain call on the American West. There is no doubt that ithis book is the final installment of the Border Triology. |
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