Dreams and Shadows

The Border Trilogy: 

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain 

by Cormac McCarthy

"The fire burned down and it grew colder and they sat close to the flames and hand fed them with sticks and with old brittle limbs they broke from the windtwisted wrecks of trees along the rimrock. They told stories of the old west that once was. The older men talked and the younger men listened and light began to show in the gap of the mountain above them and then faintly along the desert floor below." (COTP, p 91)

The first volume of The Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, combined intensely lyrical prose with the laconic wit of its cowboy protagonists. In it McCarthy mixed the quotidian details of ranch life with just the right balance of mythic phantasmagorical imaginings. Just when his prose seems to be over-the-top, he suddenly returns to the Beckett-like dialogue of two buddies alone on the prairie. One instance of this occurs when John Grady is out on the mesa with his buddy Lacey Rawlins--his Sancho to at least the extent that his adventures approached the Quixotic .

In the next volume, The Crossing, we read of two young brothers on a quest that plunges them into the bloody maelstrom of Mexican politics. Billy Parham who is later joined by his younger brother Boyd, sets out on a series of quests, all of which are doomed to failure. While the travels of Billy make up the action of the novel, it is less about achieving goals and more about larger themes of good and evil, fate and responsibility, and the nature of friendship and relationships in this gray and desolate world of shadows. Related to these themes that permeate the novel is the characters' ability or inability to clearly see the world around them.
"Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them." (The Crossing, p 46)

Cormac McCarthy concludes his border trilogy with a book that is spare and almost allegorical in its storytelling. In it he unites John Grady Cole with his older "buddy" Billy Parham, and focuses on a doomed relationship between John Grady and a Mexican prostitute. With Cities of the Plain the dreams have receded, the young men Billy and John Grady are older and their journeys have goals. This is a book that is bleaker in the telling even as the romanticism of John Grady Cole provides significant interest for the reader. The time is 1952, the place a cattle ranch in New Mexico. The West is changing as suggested by a brief interchange between John Grady and Billy early in the novel:
"What are you readin? Destry." (COTP, p 59)

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand is a classic example of the "myth of the old West". This is the life that is fading in the early 1950's and the question is will our heroes adapt or rebel against the inevitability of change. This change is not without difficulty and there are the ghosts of the past which they face as depicted in the following passage: "They sat against a rock bluff high in the Franklins with a fire before them that heeled in the wind and their figures cast up upon the rocks behind them enshadowed the petroglyphs carved there by other hunters a thousand years before." (p 87)

Shadowed by ghosts of the past and chastened but not defeated by their youthful misadventures, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham have become blood brothers of a sort, clinging stubbornly to a vanishing way of life. Billy reflects on their struggle, “When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be. . . . You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.”

While they fantasize about owning a little spread in the mountains, where they might run a few cattle and hunt their own meat, John Grady falls in love with a teenage prostitute. His desires collide with powers reminiscent of those he encountered in All the Pretty Horses.
''There's a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him,'' Billy warns him. ''Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river?''

Alas, for John Grady there are none that can compare with Magdalena. He does not worry about Eduardo, her pimp, with whom he must deal if he is to have her and his stubborn idealism sets in motion his inevitable doom. In fact, the question of one's destiny is present throughout this final part of the trilogy. Before the ultimate scenes of the novel there is a telling exchange between Billy and John Grady. I believe it alludes to John Grady's passions:
"John Grady nodded. What would you do if you couldnt be a cowboy?
I dont know. I reckon I'd think of somethin. You?
I dont know what it would be I'd think of.
Well we may all have to think of somethin." (COTP, p 217)

Combine McCarthy's two previous novels with the final somber tome and you have a masterpiece of contemporary fiction and a worthy contribution to the literature of the West. All three are works of a master story-teller, an author who speculates (some might say pontificates) on the nature of stories. So I will end with an observation about stories that I encountered during my journey through the novel.

"These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence." (COTP, p 283)