Cities of the Plain -- A Review

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   Cormac McCarthy writes like I would like to write. Spare and strong. And this from the person who always says she doesn’t like Hemingway. By-the-bye, I do like Hemingway’s short fiction. And I can’t read McCarthy one after the other without the respite of other books. Even if you know nothing about the books before you start them, you soon get a sense of the despair and desolation that reviewers talk about. The sense that these people and their way of life are passing away.

   The first book of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is All the Pretty Horses which introduces us to 16-year-old John Grady Cole who’s lost his grandfather and the ranch home he’s grown up on. It begins in 1949. Rather than move into town he crosses the border into Mexico and comes of age.

   In The Crossing we meet Billy Parham, the son of a rancher, at the beginning of and during World War II. Again we have a young man losing his family and his way of life. He can’t even get into the military and go off to war, the standard border between the way life was and the way it will be for most Americans during that time.

   In Cities of the Plain we’ve come to the last of the three books. Here John Grady and Billy are working on Mac McGovern’s ranch in the early 1950’s. A ranch destined to be bought by the government.

   McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is magnificent just as is the country where it takes place. Great distances filled with sky and earth, hot or cold sunshine and vast night. There aren’t that many people and the people who are there are as spare and hard as the country, as are their language and their relationships.

   This is a conversation between John Grady and Mac McGovern, the rancher he works for.

   John Grady listened to him going down the hall to his room. When he came back he sat down and placed a gold ring on the table.

   That’s been in my dresser drawer for three years. It aint doin nobody any good there and it never will. We talked about everthing and we talked about that ring. She didnt want it put in the ground. I want you to take it.

   Sir I dont think I can do that.

   Yes you can. I’ve already thought of everthing you could possibly say on the subject so rather than go over it item by item let’s just save the aggravation and you put it in your pocket and come Tuesday you put it on that girl’s finger.

   McCarthy is a poet when he describes this country.

The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake. She sang to herself softly as she went a song from long ago. The dawn was two hours away. The town one.

   McCarthy knows his people and he loves them. He recognizes the philosophers among the poor and resilient. John Grady comes to a blind musician to ask him to act as godfather for the woman he wants to wed. The old man tells him a story explaining why a dying man in great wisdom, chose his most hated enemy to be his son’s godfather. The story begins this way.

He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that a man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

   The enemy who became godfather to the man’s son found that he must dedicate his entire life to the son. Because there could never be forgiveness, the enemy could not ‘dislodge’ the man. A friend who had loved him could more easily have thought of his dead friend in comfort and sadness and eased himself under the burden of such a responsibility.

   The Border Trilogy are not comfortable books to read. Like the country, they are beautiful and threaten death. The people who inhabit these books are tough. Their lives are broken and battered by sudden and unforgiving violence. They do not so much survive as endure.

   Do not let your obs-comp grammar ways get between you and these books. There are still people like these – unassuming but not subservient, under-educated but not unknowing, not especially civilized but enlightened. And some are still cowboys.