CITIES OF THE PLAIN

Cormac McCarthy’s third volume of The Border Trilogy offers the reader more about the cowboy life versus the first two novels, All the Pretty Horses (see my review of 4/2/2013) and The Crossing (see my review of 10/3/2013). Don’t get me wrong, this novel is still very dark, but I did like the ranch exploits of our two protagonist before the heavy duty grief set in. This novel brings back the expert horse trainer, John Grady Cole, the main character in All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham, the excellent tracker and the principle character in The Crossing. They are both working as ranch hands on a ranch shortly to be taken over by the U.S. Army in New Mexico. With cattle ranching on the downside and a possible sale of the ranch, it’s fairly depressing for the ranch hands and owner, Mac McGovern. Cormac continues his previous style of using numerous Spanish sentences, phrases and words, such as, alcahuete (pimp). Yes my friends, once again a woman, this time a whore, is going to bring in the dark clouds. If you remember John Grady fell in love with a rancher’s beautiful daughter, Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses. This time he falls in love with a young whore he meets in Juarez, Mexico. Also continued is Cormac’s method of no quotation marks, which works surprisingly well.

The guts of the story centers around John Cole falling in love with a whore, Magdalena, in Juarez. The owner of the brothel, Eduardo, and his main pimp, Tiburcio, don’t like John. John wants to buy Magdalena from Eduardo, bring her across the border and marry her, but has no chance with Eduardo disliking him. John Cole enlist the aid of Billy Parham. He tells Billy that he wants him to go to the brothel and buy the girl for him since Eduardo doesn’t know him. Billy says, “Let me see if I got this straight. You want me to go to a whorehouse in Juarez mexico and buy this whore cash money and bring her back across the river to the ranch. Is that about the size of it?” (I’m using quotation marks that were not in the novel). John Grady nodded. “Shit”, said Billy. “Smile or somethin, will you? Goddamn. Tell me you aint gone completely crazy.” “I aint gone completely crazy” “The hell you aint.” “I’m in love with her, Billy.” (by the way, some of the previous words are not typos). Billy goes to Juarez to meet with Eduardo. “Eduardo was sitting at his desk smoking black cigars...How may I help you?” “I got a business proposition for you”, Billy said. “What I wanted”, said Billy, “was to buy one of these girls.” “You believe these girls are here against their will?” (this character, Eduardo was very scary) “Tell me this”, he said. “All right.” "Are you the principal or agent?” Obviously Eduardo knows that Billy is here representing John Cole, and we find out later that Eduardo is also in love with Magdalena and would rather slit her throat then let her go.

Billy gets back to the ranch very late and goes into the ranch kitchen for a cup of coffee. John is there waiting for him. John says, “Did you offer him money?” “Oh we had a pretty good visit, take it all around.” “What did he say?” “He said she didn’t want to leave there.” “Well that’s a lie.” “Well that may be. But he says she aint leavin.” “Well she is.” “He leaned forward and began to count off (for John) on the fingers of the hand that held the cigarette: She aint American. She aint a citizen. She dont speak english. She works in a whorehouse. No, hear me out. And last but not least-he sat holding his thumb-there’s a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him. Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river?” “Not like Her.” Okay, this is where I stop my review and the dark clouds begin to move in. No modern author can write with Cormack McCarthy’s nerve-racking technique. If you want proof of that see two movies that were adapted from his novels, The Road and No Country for Old Men. This was a great novel, and I’m glad that I finally finished The Border Trilogy.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: This was the novel that I read on the jet to Hawaii. There is no way that I can fall asleep on a jet, so I always bring two books with me. The novel that I read from Hawaii back to New Jersey was Dumb Witness (see my review of 4/28/2017).