‘The completed trilogy emerges as a landmark in American literature’ Guardian
Cities of the Plain (Border Trilogy)
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On a Texan ranch, soon after the second world war, a group of solitary, inarticulately lonely men gathers to work animals as the sun sets for good on the mythic American West. All of these men nurse losses both personal (siblings or wives) and collective (a shared lifestyle and philosophy). Among them is John Grady Cole, the adolescent hero of the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy, All the Pretty Horses. John Grady remains the magnificent horseman he always was, and he still dreams too much. On the ranch, he meets Billy Parham, whose own tragic sojourn through Mexico in The Crossing, the second book of the set, continues to quietly suffocate him. The two form a friendship that will nurture both but save neither from the destiny that McCarthy's characters always sense lurching to meet them.
Soaked in storm-heavy atmosphere but brightened by the ranchers' easy camaraderie and gentle humour, Cities of the Plain surprises with its sweetness. The awkward doomed-romance plot at the centre of this tight, concise novel fails to convince, but, remarkably, does little to undercut the book's impact. What lingers here, and what matters, are the brooding, eerie portraits of the plains and the riders, glimpsed mostly alone but occasionally leaning together, who slip across them, over the horizon and into memory. -- Glen Hirshberg --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
“…a masterpiece… McCarthy’s prose is so melodious that it demands to be read out aloud.”
Sunday Times 7/6/98
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First Sentence
THEY STOOD in the doorway and stomped the rain from their boots and swung their hats and wiped the water from their faces. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
THEY STOOD in the doorway and stomped the rain from their boots and swung their hats and wiped the water from their faces. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
By J. Beevers
Format:Hardcover
I guess the greatest gift that I writer can give is a little of his own soul. All three books in "The Border Trilogy" give the reader such a profound feeling of having been written from the heart, that to finish each book is like parting with a friend, and the completion of the Trilogy is like bereavement. One of the aspects that make these books so affecting is that they concern ordinary people who try extraordinarily hard to do the right thing against the overwhelming opposition of landscape, history and the future as other, lesser people, see it. "Cities of the Plain" brings together the protagonists from the two earlier works and as friends they reprise the doomed enterprise of the earlier works. This revisiting by McCarthy of similar themes throughout the Trilogy serves to highlight his concept that we are all pawns in a bigger game but nonetheless we should endeavour to play to some higher rule in order that collectively we may amount to something better. If all this sounds rather grandiose, well, it is, and it matters. In a very different way Richard Ford illuminates a similar area in his Frank Bascombe books, but whereas Ford's characters are found in everyday settings, both McCarthy's settings and language are epic. I have read criticism that he goes too far with his archaic language and tumbling sentences. Well, he may do occasionally, but I would read McCarthy for the prose alone, and consider plot, characterisation etc a bonus. I can think only of Annie Proulx right now whose prose is such a delight for its own sake and both make much other good reading seem turgid in comparison. Harold Bloom states that we read to enrich our experience, our wisdom, our healing. This is true of literature of this calibre. Cities of the Plain is a fine conclusion to an ennobling reading experience. I anticipate that I will read this Trilogy many times.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This final novel in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy of the southwest brings together the themes McCarthy has developed throughout the trilogy. In the first novel, All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy stresses the romanticism of John Grady Cole, who runs away to become a cowboy, suffers a heart-breaking loss at love, and returns, sadder and perhaps wiser, to find solace in the solitude of his work on the plains.
Times are changing as the 20th century progresses, however, and the independent life of ranchers is threatened. In The Crossing, a far darker novel which takes place a few years later, Billy Parham, another young man, takes off with his brother, crossing the border into Mexico, to explore its older traditions and ways of life. Cities of the Plain, with Biblical suggestions in the title, brings young John Grady Cole and the older Billy Parham together, as they work on the McGovern ranch in Texas in the 1950s. The wilderness is disappearing, cities are encroaching, and an army base may take their land.
Focusing less on the harshness of ranch life than in past novels, McCarthy here concentrates more on character, in this case, that of John Grady Cole, who falls in love with a prostitute from Juarez and wants to bring her across the border to his way of life. Billy Parham counsels him against marrying her, but John Grady is determined to wrest her away from Eduardo, her manager, and give her the peace that she has never known. Life is harsh, however, and outcomes are bleak for dreamers and altruists. John Grady soon finds himself engaged in a struggle with Eduardo which is vicious and unrelenting, a metaphorical struggle between honor and evil, and between civilized values and the "justice" of tooth and claw, hope and desperation, and acceptance of change and adherence to the past.
McCarthy's gorgeous descriptions of this vanishing way of life on the ranch are as effective here as they are in the other novels in the trilogy, though they seem to be presented nostalgically. Times are changing, and the "old man," the ranch owner, is now becoming senile. Civilization is drawing closer, and John Grady, the cowboy, uses taxis instead of horses when he is in a hurry to travel. As McCarthy draws the reader into John Grady's story, the reader knows that the struggle between him and Eduardo is a mythic struggle, and s/he also knows what the likely outcome will be. The elegance with which the ending is drawn, however, gives both potency and poignancy to McCarthy's message. Mary Whipple
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Mccarthy has created another masterpiece of modern American writing to add to his formidable works. The characters from the first two books in the "trllogy" take on the raw world of ranching on the mexican border and a fateful tale beyond normal imagination is played out in Mccarthy's inimitable technicolour of language.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Terrific Read
McCarthy brings everything to life, I have never been there and probably never will, but I see the countryside and feel its emptiness and small kindnesses and daily struggle
Published 16 days ago by Clive
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful book
This is a book that draws you in and holds your attention from cover to cover. I became so completely absorbed that I felt a distinct sense of loss when it came to an end. Read more
Published 2 months ago by J M Robertson
5.0 out of 5 stars
PEERLESS
As the final book of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain is perhaps slighter than the first two stories - but no less moving and tragic for that. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Scribbler
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loyalty, courage, love and death in the American West
Frrom boyhood when I used to watch Westerns with my Dad on a 12" screen B&W TV I have been a lifelong aficionado of novels and films about the American West. Read more
Published 4 months ago by cimic
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Border Trilogy
I consider the McCarthy's Border trilogy on a par with Updike's Rabbit opus as a document to chronicle a part of Americana that we do not often appreciate here in the UK.
Published 5 months ago by Graham Sherwood
5.0 out of 5 stars
Work of a Genius
If you haven't come across Cormac McCarthy before then you're in for a treat. The Border trilogy is set against the magnificently evoked backdrop of the American West and Mexico. Read more
Published 5 months ago by stansmum
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy finale
All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing are amongst the best books I've ever read. Although COTP tends to ramble a bit and is a little too long, it is ultimately rewarding and a... Read more
Published 6 months ago by marcillac25
5.0 out of 5 stars
so glad I read this
This is the concluding book in the trilogy, and is a superbly eloquent telling of the final part of the story of the central characters. Read more
Published 8 months ago by C. midgley
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Hand Of Fate
This 1998 novel concludes Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy (following the earlier All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing) which, for me, taken together constitutes some of the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Keith M
5.0 out of 5 stars
As good as it gets
McCarthy finishes off the Border Trilogy with this absolute game killer of a book. This final part of the trilogy set in the early fifties in a rapidly changing America. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Daniel Bowman
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