Cities of the Plain

Read from Friday, July 8th to Wednesday, July 13th.

Cities of the Plain, the final installment in the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy.  In this novel, John Grady Cole, from All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parnham, from The Crossing are united.  Both fresh from their respective journeys in and out of Mexico, they now work as ranch hands on a ranch near El Paso in Texas.  Much of the beginning part of the book is spent depicting life on the ranch.  They are both good friends even though John is only 19 and Billy is in his upper twenties.  There are a few other workers, and the boss is nice, but the ranching industry is dying in that area because the government wants to take it over.  They comfort themselves with stories about the Old West, and they sometimes go to town for whiskey and beer.

The story begins, as with the others, when they cross the border into Mexico.  This time, the boys from the ranch go to a whorehouse in Juarez, just across the border.  There, John Grady sees a beautiful, young prostitute named Magdalena.  He doesn't 'meet her' that night, but goes back many times by himself.  He is captivated by her, and falls madly in love.  She is shy, and fragile, and has epilepsy and seizures that she keeps hidden from John Grady, but she loves him back.  Of course, she is a prostitute, and also someone else's property.  That man is Eduardo.  He refuses to sell Magdalena, mainly because he loves her as well, even though he beats her.

The novel progresses with John Grady wondering what to do.  Billy tries to talk sense into him; tells him that he is being unrealistic and no girl is worth that much trouble.  But John Grady follows his heart and he makes plans for their marriage.  He fixes up an old run-down cabin on the ranch and he sells his horse and possessions to pay for everything.  At one point, there are wild dogs picking off cattle on the ranch, and so the boys set off one night and hunt down the pack and kill most of them.  John Grady and Billy know that since one the dead dogs had been breast-feeding, there must be a litter of puppies, so they set out in search of them.  They find the litter, and John Grady keeps one of the dogs for himself and Magdalena.

Finally, the day arrives when Magdalena is supposed to leave and run away to the U.S. with John Grady.  Their plan is to meet at a diner near the border.  Magdalena sneaks out, and she is terrified, and makes it to the diner, where a man picks her up after awhile claiming to be a friend of John Grady.  He isn't, of course, and one of Eduardo's henchman kills her by the river.  John Grady is enraged and heartbroken when he finds out later that day by visiting the morgue.  He is a suspect in the murder because Eduardo reported him, so he has to stay hidden.  When Billy finds out, he goes to Juarez and confronts Eduardo and knocks out one of his henchmen, but Eduardo says there is nothing he can do.  Billy talks with the police and accuses Eduardo of the murder.

John Grady eventually emerges and confronts Eduardo in the alley behind the whorehouse.  They have a knife fight, but Eduardo is a skilled cuchillero and he slashes up John Grady.  In the same style as the prison fight in ATPH, John Grady lets himself get slashed up in order to strike a fatal blow to Eduardo when he gets in close enough.  He stabs him right up through the jaw.  John Grady staggers away to a small hovel, where he pays a boy to call the ranch, and Billy comes to find him.  He is able to comfort John Grady in his last moments of life, but he is too wounded to survive, and he dies.

Billy is distraught, and in a long epilogue, McCarthy tells the story of the rest of his life.  He wanders the southwest for years and years, always alone and always being chased by droughts.  Finally, as an old man in the present, he is travelling across highways as a bum.  He meets another man, and at first Billy believes he is Death come for him.  But this strange man is not, he is just another traveller, and he tells the story of a dream he had.  In the dream, he dreamt of another traveller in the ruins of an ancient civilization, and this person himself had a dream where he was to be sacrificed in that very spot.  It is a very interesting conversation they have about the meaning of life and death, the things you can know and not know, and the universality of those themes.

Once again, McCarthy writes a brilliant, gripping story about the journeys around the Mexican border.  More and more, the border stands for more things in these character's lives.  It is the border of life and death, from which there is no going back.  There is a lot of religious imagery and symbolism in the work as well.  Of course, it is a difficult book, as you are thrown right into the middle of the characters lives, and there is no backstory, and most of the plot is advanced through dialogue that is not always attached to a character.  Much of the dialogue is in Spanish as well, so if you do not have a background in Spanish you will have a lot of trouble.  It was a slow start as well, and took me awhile to figure out what was happening, who was who, and what relation people had to one another.  However, everything soon clicked and the story got really enthralling, and I finished the book with a long reading session in which I couldn't put the book down for hours on end.  Really great book and really great series overall.  Four and a half out of five stars.