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A review by huerca_armada
Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
The final entry of McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a tough one to bear. Returning from their uncertain endings in the previous two entries, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham now find themselves working as ranchers in a town near the border cities of El Paso and Juarez. Stricken by drought and stuck in an uncertain fate, both Cole and Parham find themselves caught in the tenuous place of a world that is breathing its last.
If you've read this far in the trilogy you know what to expect. Violent prose. Ruminations upon God and human nature. Copious passages of untranslated Spanish that you've come to fashion a pidgin language out of. And the melancholic, bittersweet track that the characters have firmly planted themselves in and which they are unable to extricate themselves from.
At no point in the reading did I find Cities of the Plain to be nearly as bleak as that of The Crossing, wherein every hopeful moment in comparison to All the Pretty Horses was teased out just enough so that it could mercilessly crushed out of existence without a second thought. Where Cities of the Plain differs is the final realization of the overarching theme that has dominated the Border Trilogy as it concludes -- the fates of men and women are not so neatly there own, despite their own belief. They are inextricably linked together, their paths fashioned by and out of the world around them, so that no other future may seem possible than the one that they are travelling towards. The deaths of both Magdalena, the young Mexican prostitute, and John Grady Cole are inevitable from the moment the reader takes in the scope of their situation. Yet still, you hope for the best, that the track they are sliding down can be broken or jumped in any way. And when it doesn't, how can we be so surprised? Yet, we are anyways.
As painful as the death of John Grady Cole is, the epilogue that follows Parham's path through life, glossing over decades until he is an old man, homeless and a vagrant of the former ranching country, that leaves one with a feeling of emptiness. Parham's survived countless things throughout both Cities of the Plain and The Crossing, and it seems his fate that even as death graces everyone around him, in the end it is just him that is left to haunt the hills, wraith-like. Even his chance encounter with the Stranger under the highway overpass in the epilogue, most clearly Death itself, passes him by after they sit and talk for a time. Where John Grady Cole sought out and received his own death, it seems that Parham's fate is to exist solely as a vessel to watch the passings of others around him.
As always whenever I finish one of McCarthy's books, I can only sit back and let a strange feeling wash over me that I can't describe. Something resonant to my core, without a name or description, but which from time to time makes me recall particular scenes, passages, and events that McCarthy has penned out. After getting to know both Cole and Parham for so long in the course of their travels and their tribulations, the end comes so suddenly that it can only leave me feeling emptied out. Is that all that there is? And the final realization is that yes, it is -- no more and no less.
If you've read this far in the trilogy you know what to expect. Violent prose. Ruminations upon God and human nature. Copious passages of untranslated Spanish that you've come to fashion a pidgin language out of. And the melancholic, bittersweet track that the characters have firmly planted themselves in and which they are unable to extricate themselves from.
At no point in the reading did I find Cities of the Plain to be nearly as bleak as that of The Crossing, wherein every hopeful moment in comparison to All the Pretty Horses was teased out just enough so that it could mercilessly crushed out of existence without a second thought. Where Cities of the Plain differs is the final realization of the overarching theme that has dominated the Border Trilogy as it concludes -- the fates of men and women are not so neatly there own, despite their own belief. They are inextricably linked together, their paths fashioned by and out of the world around them, so that no other future may seem possible than the one that they are travelling towards. The deaths of both Magdalena, the young Mexican prostitute, and John Grady Cole are inevitable from the moment the reader takes in the scope of their situation. Yet still, you hope for the best, that the track they are sliding down can be broken or jumped in any way. And when it doesn't, how can we be so surprised? Yet, we are anyways.
As painful as the death of John Grady Cole is, the epilogue that follows Parham's path through life, glossing over decades until he is an old man, homeless and a vagrant of the former ranching country, that leaves one with a feeling of emptiness. Parham's survived countless things throughout both Cities of the Plain and The Crossing, and it seems his fate that even as death graces everyone around him, in the end it is just him that is left to haunt the hills, wraith-like. Even his chance encounter with the Stranger under the highway overpass in the epilogue, most clearly Death itself, passes him by after they sit and talk for a time. Where John Grady Cole sought out and received his own death, it seems that Parham's fate is to exist solely as a vessel to watch the passings of others around him.
As always whenever I finish one of McCarthy's books, I can only sit back and let a strange feeling wash over me that I can't describe. Something resonant to my core, without a name or description, but which from time to time makes me recall particular scenes, passages, and events that McCarthy has penned out. After getting to know both Cole and Parham for so long in the course of their travels and their tribulations, the end comes so suddenly that it can only leave me feeling emptied out. Is that all that there is? And the final realization is that yes, it is -- no more and no less.