Cormac McCarthy

The conclusion of the Border trilogy describes the friendship of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, two cowboys working on a New Mexico ranch in the 1950s

Cities of the Plain

Cities of the plain

Joey Baker

I'm depressed now. Thanks Cormac! :)


Also I just want to say the scene of killing wild dogs by taking them for a fag-drag from horseback was pretty crazy. So unnecessarily brutal. Why wouldn't they just use guns?
Definitely makes for a cooler and more memorable scene though.

Ryan LaFerney

Cities of the Plain concludes McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy. It brings together the protagonists from each of the previous two volumes. John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses is now nineteen years old and nine years the junior of Billy Parham from The Crossing. John and Billy share an loving bond and a deep passion for riding horses and living off the land. They work as ranch hands for a respected landowner on his farm not far from the Mexican border. Yet, when John Grady tumbles helplessly in love with a sixteen-year-old Mexican prostitute, Magdalena, from across the border, he provokes the ire of the girl’s pimp. John’s relentless desire to marry the girl leads him down a dangerous and fateful path. Billy’s attempts to protect his friend draw him into the violent turmoil where there is no turning back. The violence quickly boils to an all out blood bath as Billy confronts the pimp in a battle that reminds one of the ill-fated meeting of Macbeth and Macduff in its poetic grandeur. The anguish that Billy Parham feels for his lost friend is heartbreaking.

The end of book focuses on Billy and his wanderings. On his journey, he meets a mysterious man who tells him about a convoluted dream. Though the man denies it, Billy suspects he is Death. However, Billy survives the meeting with the man and finds shelter and a new life with a family who takes him in. The book ends with Billy, it seems, putting his restless and sometimes violent past behind him, with a new lease on life. It would seem that the "romance" of the cowboy way of life has faded for Billy, and the reality and harshness of the world has taken root. And that he has achieved some sort of wisdom from it.

Cities of the Plain is a melancholy story, deftly told in poetic grandeur, about American violence, idealistic romance, and a fading way of life

Christopher Wheeler

Roel Vandenhoeck

Kevin. j Mercil 

Cities of the Plain (Border Trilogy)

Nuno Figueiredo

Phil James

Pate Hubbard

Geoffrey Landward

Donald

Jan Jackson

Ashley Dotterweich

Caleb Yarian

Volume Three of the Border Trilogy In Cormac McCarthy's Cities of the Plain, two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together, between their vivid pasts and uncertain futures, to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn again and again, in this story of friendships and passion, to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

Owen Kraft

Cities of the Plain

Reviews