Rating represents The Border Trilogy as a whole, and is mostly brought down by Cities of the Plains, an imperfect synthesis of the thematic material before it. I should get some kind of AP Spanish credit for being able to understand like half of the untranslated Spanish in these books.

All the Pretty Horses is a subversive vaquero romance that introduces us to John Grady Cole and his buddy Rawlins, whose naïve approach to life south of the border brings them into trouble, especially when John Grady begins a flirtation with the daughter of the owner of the ranch where they work. McCarthy depicts the romance between the two as tender, while never forgetting that these are two children in a world that is utterly hostile to that kind of innocence. The romance, and the actions of a dumbass kid cowboy searching for a stolen horse, bring them to peril and nearly to ruin. The book is written in a more tender mode than McCarthy's preceding work, Blood Meridian, but the sweeping language never touches the romance. It can't. McCarthy's strange style, a synthesis of Melville and Hemingway (and a touch of Faulkner, though he's never as opaque), depicts the world as it is. Not as we want it to be.

The Crossing is the one true masterpiece of the trilogy, a book that deserves to stand with Blood Meridian and The Road as McCarthy's finest work. It depicts three separate journeys across the border by Billy Parham, another young cowboy. If All the Pretty Horse was a deconstruction of the cowboy romance, then The Crossing returns to the more general subversion of the Western seen in Blood Meridian, though it never reaches those heights of brutality. Billy's journey is almost picaresque in structure, as each of his trips south find him encountering strangers who either help or harm him, some of whom tell him Dostoevsky-esque stories rich in thematic depth. McCarthy's language is at its most esoteric here, and the ending is haunting.

Cities of the Plains seems almost bound to have been a lesser work; it brings together John Grady Cole and Billy Parham years later as hands on a ranch. Each alludes to their past travels to Mexico at some point but the text does not linger on these references, nor is this treated as some grand team-up; instead, we see John Grady Cole in a different light, believing in romance but without the narrative backing his desire. He wishes to marry a sixteen-year old sex worker from a Mexican brothel. He claims love, but there is the lingering memory of his unrequited romance and a certain sense of heroism behind his actions. Billy attempts to dissuade his younger colleague, but John Grady cannot be dissuaded. It culminates in one of the most harrowing fight scenes I've read in fiction. The book concludes with an epilogue that's probably better than much of what came before it; Cities of the Plains lacks the elegance of the previous two works, which may come from its origins as a screenplay. The style is closer to the sparser style seen in No Country For Old Men, and a certain thematic resonance is lost in the plot-driven narrative.

If it weren't for Cities of the Plains, I don't think these books would be seen as anything more than a continuation of of McCarthy's focus on the Western. Synthesizing the two books by uniting their protagonists lends us to consider the works as a whole, which I don't think is strictly necessary or even fruitful. These books lament the West even as they acknowledge the romance of it to be fictitious. It was what it was and now it is gone.

Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy consists All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. It tops out at over 1,000 pages. Instead of discouraging or boring me, the 1,000 pages made me want more, more, more of John Grady Cole, more of Billy Parham, more of their relatives, friends, and loves, and more of McCarthy’s wonderfully economical, precise, and evocative writing. I have no particular interest in the fading days of cowboys in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, but The Border Trilogy centers less on the Southwest than on timeless questions of friendships, loyalty, and growing up. Much as I enjoy McCarthy’s prose, I’m always leery of reading a McCarthy novel new to me: will there be more violence than I can stomach?; no such issue with The Border Trilogy. An American classic, which I look forward to reading again and again.

The title could have been "Never go to Mexico".
Nothing new about the dangers of traveling and the usual corruption, bad chance, blood, evil man that kills young boys and co scenario's. I feel exactly the same emotions when I watch the news.
I could adapt to his different writing style but not to his passion for suffering and crualty and I had the feeling that when he got ennoyed with one of his characters he just found a thrilling way to get them out of his book.

For me it was like driving for hours to get to a dead-end...

When it comes to a series, this might be the best I've ever dealt with. I love how the first two books have nothing to do with each other, but the last slowly brings them together. When Billy Parham has his last chapter in the final book it brings me to tears how he is basically a washed up nobody who at the same time is a link to the past, how he loves his deceased siblings so much a half century after he saw them. I pity Cormac McCarthy. I see a fraction into his mind when he writes and see he is genius, tortured, and ugly. He is amazing.

"every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time is come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?"

Three more great works by my favorite novelist ever hold up really well over 15 years since I last read them. "All the pretty horses" is likely the most "fun" McCarthy that I've read so far, with its main thrust being two young people who fall in love against their best instincts and it ends badly, though McCarthy frames it less as a sad story and more about young people learning lessons by pushing their own boundaries, which comes to be a theme in all three books. Nevertheless, since this is McCarthy, there is more than enough violence, conflict and hurt feelings to go around and, while all of the writing is, as usual, awesome, McCarthy's skills come across best in two extended sequences that are absolutely breathtaking: the first is the amazingly violent attempt by a Mexican knifeman to murder the protagonist, John Grady Cole, and the second an extended twenty-page monologue by an old woman telling Cole about the difficulties of her life and, in masterful fashion, threading in the history of Mexico's Civil War and the way women have been treated there historically.

The second novel, "The Crossing," centers on another young man, Billy Parham, who loses his parents at a young age and, even before that, experiences a series of misadventures both forcing him against his will, and sometimes very much to his liking, to cross the border into Mexico. He has a brother that also enters into an unwise relationship and so on, and in this one some of the best passages include Billy's mythical and very wary "friendship" with a female wolf and, during his many travels, an encounter with a Yaqui Indian.

Finally, in "Cities of the plain," among other things, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham unite, the former gets into another poorly-thought-out relationship , and though this one starts out the slowest of all of the novels it still has a lot of strong passages including another knife fight and lots of great stuff describing how Cole, a horse whisperer of a kind, sees horses as much wiser beings than most of the other characters do.

Below is one of my favorite short passages, taken from "The Crossing:"

"She was lying in the floor of the cart in a bed of straw. They'd taken the rope from her collar and fitted the collar with a chain and run the chain through the floorboards of the cart so that it was all that she could do to rise and stand. Beside her in the straw was a clay bowl that perhaps held water. A young boy stood with his elbows hung over the top board of the cart with a jockeystick held loosely across his shoulder. When he saw enter what he took for a paying customer he stood up and began to prod the wolf with the stick and to hiss at her.
She ignored the prodding. She was lying on her side breathing in and out quietly. He looked at the injured leg. He stood the rifle against the cart and called to her.
She rose instantly and turned and stood looking at him with her ears erect. The boy holding the jockeystick looked up at him across the top of the cart.
He talked to her a long time and as the boy tending the wolf could not understand what it was he said he said what was in his heart. He made her promises that he swore to keep in the making. That he would take her to the mountains where he would find others of her kind. She watched him with her yellow eyes and in them was no despair but only that same reckonless deep of loneliness that cored the world to its heart. He turned and looked at the boy. He was about to speak when the pitchman ducked inside under the canopy and hissed at them. El viene, he said. El viene.
Maldicion, the boy said. He threw aside his stick and he and the pitchman set about taking down the sheets and untying the cords from the stakes they'd driven into the mud. As the sheets fell the carretero came at a trot across the alameda and fell in to help them, snatching up the sheets and hissing at them to hurry. Soon they were backing the little blindfold mule between the shafts of the cart and fitting the harness and buckling it about.
La tablilla, cried the carretero. The boy snatched up the sign and pushed it under the pile of ropes and sheeting and the carretero mounted up into the cart and called out the pitchman and the pitchman snatched away the blindfold from the mule's eyes and mule and cart and wolf and driver went rattling and clattering out into the street. Fairgoers scattered away before them and the carretero looked back wildly up the road where the alguacil and his entourage were just entering the town from the south-alguacil and attendants and retainers and friends and mozos de estribo and mozos de cuadra all with their equipage winking in the sun and trotting among the legs of the horses upwards of two dozen hunting dogs.
The boy had already turned and started toward the street to get his horse. By the time he'd untied it and shoved the rifle into the scabbard and mounted up and swung the horse into the street the alguacil and his party were passing along the alameda four and six abreast, calling out to one another, many of them garbed in the gaudy attire of the norteno and of the charro all spangled and trimmed with silver braid, the seams of their trousers done with silver shells. They rode saddles worked in silver with flat pommels the size of plates and some were drunk riding and doffed their enormous hats in gestures of outlandish courtliness at women their horses had forced against buildings or into doorways. The hunting dogs trotting neat of foot beneath them seemed alone sober and purposive and they paid no mind at all to the town dogs that sallied out bristling behind them or indeed to anything at all. They were some of them black in color or black and tan but for the most part they were bluetick dogs brought into the country from the north years before and some were so like in pattern and color to the speckled horses they paced that they seemed tailored from the same piece of hide. The horses sidled and stepped and tossed their heads and the riders pulled them about but the dogs trotted steadily upon the road before them as if they had a lot on their minds.
He waited in the crossroads for them to pass. Some nodded to him and wished him a good day as to a fellow horseman but if the alguacil in passing recognized him sitting his horse in this new wayplace he gave no sign so. When they had passed horses and dogs and all he put his horse into the road again and set out behind them and behind the carreta now vanished upriver in the distance."

McCarthy's epic is certainly a behemoth to behold, as the reader traverses the landscapes of Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. Readers are greeted with a funeral and this slow-paced trilogy gradually unravels a series of events fitting of a drama and an ensemble of characters who share in flaws and humanity - some more morally good than others but all a product of their world and time.
That was the impression I got from McCarthy, anyway. He presents his characters with a physical description lacking in detail compared to the environments he describes, but no less poetic and even in its paucity, one is able to conjure an image of how the characters may look. Likewise, his practice of describing movement down to the detail allows one to follow the capturing of a wolf or visualize the bloody killing of a character. This gruesome detailing may turn off some readers, akin to a prose-form of Quinton Tarantino's gratuitous gore, but that has not been my experience. For me, McCarthy's violence with its anatomical details seems almost scientifically detached from the violence's emotional force, lending itself to be a presentation of the blind state in which some murders may occur. Even so, the depth of the violence allows the reader to still feel a disgust or awe in what is happening.
Scenes of violence and meandering across the desert are broken up by lengthy monologues by characters, which gives the reader the opportunity to pause and consider some philosophical and theological questions. McCarthy touches on God, mortality, the changing of the American West in the twentieth-century, and, of course, love. Not just romantic love, but that love which young people possess through which they see the beauty of life and think that their time and place in the world is unique to all of those who came before. More than just stating these points, McCarthy presents them as arguments, either of himself or just of his characters. No right answers are presented, arguably, but the points are made for the reader to at least consider.
McCarthy's attention to detail as he describes a scene is quite powerful and leads to the reader being mentally in those spaces, as they can see the desert, the bushes, and the sky. In fact, while I did not do this, one may be aided if they pulled up a map that includes the various towns and mesa's described and they can trace the path of the various characters as they follow along.
A note on narrative perspective. McCarthy uses third-person omniscient, which one would expect to allow the reader to see-all and know-all in terms of what is happening. However, I think McCarthy's writing style, such as dropping readers into the middle of a scene or simply omitting certain details, allows the reader to experience a sense of confusion or mystery while reading his trilogy, instead of feeling their hand is being held. Of course, the usefulness of such a style depends on the subjective opinions of the reader.
I personally choose "The Crossing" as my favorite book from The Border Trilogy. I choose it due to the highlighting of McCarthy's unique prose, the monologue by one of the characters regarding "the cities of the plain", and the fraternal love and drama of the main characters.
That being said, all three books are a great read and each contribute to the rich artistic power of the complete trilogy. I cannot wait to read them all again!

I believe that McCarthy was one of the most important writers of the last 100 years. This trilogy makes you come face to face with our conflicted time on this earth and how futile our efforts are to find our place. While there is little talk of how God fits into our lives it should be evident to any reader that He is our only hope here on earth and certainly in eternity.

It took me a while to get through this trilogy, since I took a break between the second and third book, but I'm so glad I finally finished it.

All the Pretty Horses was definitely the strongest and most even, in my opinion. McCarthy introduces his epic hero, John Grady Cole, and it's hard not to fall in love with him from the beginning.

The Crossing, which introduces the trilogy's second protagonist was my least favorite of the three. The narrative kept wandering into philosophical discussions for several pages at a time, and it was difficult to stay engaged with the story.

Cities of the Plains brings both protagonists together, and makes a fitting end to their intertwined stories, excecpt for a very unsatisfying epilogue that makes an unbelievable 50-year leap and lapses into another dreamlike philosophical tangent.

So, why five stars? The language, my goodness, the language of these books is beautiful. There are passages and descriptions that I reread again and again, thinking I never would have made such observations or thought to use such analogies, but they convey the scene so perfectly. For example: "Narrow spires of smoke standing vertically into the windless dawn so still the village seemed to hang by threads from the darkness."

Also, McCarthy writes some of my favorite dialogue ever. When I read exchanges between characters, I hear their voices come alive. I grew up in West Texas, and he really nails the way people talk.

As bleak as these stories are at times, he's got a subtle, but wicked, sense of humor. I often laugh out loud as I'm reading.

An incredible writer.

Deze drie boeken in 1 keer achter elkaar lezen was ZO waardevol. Alles hieraan is prachtig, zoals altijd te verwachten is met Cormac McCarthy

Another Western epic, recommend reading with Red Dead ambience playing out of a low quality phone speaker next to you. Had to take a long break about a third of the way into the second one, which is the best. Seemed similar to the first but also I can’t remember much of that one. Flew through the third one which is probably the weakest. Maybe I’m not smart enough but this was approaching too much profundity by the end. Maybe 1040ish pages of literary mastery spoils the reader and they stop appreciating it.

All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain are far and away the most lucid, and therefore tolerable novels of the trilogy. The Crossing, however, is almost insurmountably tedious. It contains, in spades, what is worst about all three novels, and in my opinion, Cormac McCarthy's style in general -- namely, the laughably pretentious, brooding, self-serious prose; the noxiously ponderous cast of needless characters who pontificate over pages and pages on the souls of men, wolves, and horses; and all of it couched in some sort of vague, parochial pseudo-spiritualism.

Really, how he's considered a serious novelist (by anyone but himself) is a mystery to me.