totally killer. McCarthy delves into a totally sad time period. You're still riding a horse, but everyone else is driving cars. You become an old man, a migrant worker your whole life, with a dwindling skill-set of dwindling importance in a world being modernized. In your youth you dragged a pregnant wolf all the way to Mexico because you didn't want to kill her, only to have her taken from you and die in a dogfight. "The Crossing" is the saddest book I have ever read. Rape and murder and vengeance and cruelty, and underneath it all is a vast, bottomless river of the most morbid sadness, a sadness beyond any words.

A great book from a great writer. Although is is a big read it is interesting from start to finish, especially when the stories start coming together. Quentin Tarantino style.

The big themes in this book are fate, love and death which are worked out in an almost philosopical way. ‘Every deed that is not from the heart will be exposed eventually’

The first novel of the the trilogy is All the Pretty Horses. It depicts a world with it’s own rules, north of the Mexican border. Life is harsh, but people seem to be polite and loyal. That basic attitude changes as soon as John Brady and a friend, both sixteen years old, cross the border into Mexico on a trip that doesn’t seem to have a real purpose. They just want to see what’s there. But John Brady also wants to find out what’s his destiny, how he has to live his life. Of course, reality catches up with the boys and they have a hard time getting out alive. As we travel with them the question of destiny is pushed to the background. But in the end, this is not just a story about some cowboys having an adventure. It’s a tale about the discovery of the main character’s identity.

One of those books you feel guilty for not liking. Very well written, countryside beautifully described. But I just didn’t really “feel” this book. Too much untranslated Spanish, I tried to look up translation as I read, but then the story lost its flow. At the end I was exhausted.

All three books are powerful. The first two introduce the two main characters that meet in the third, but you could read each separately. Each has a sad inevitability, but you can immerse yourself in the writing style. Even the passages in Spanish, which are, for the most part, untranslated, ads to the texture and atmosphere. Even if you don't understand the dialog, you can gather the meaning. It just means you have to pay more attention, but that's not hard to do, because the characters and descriptions are extremely vivid.

The Border Trilogy is a deeply moving unforgettable read. Each book may be read as a stand alone novel, but reading the books in order yields the best experience.The border Trilogy is truly a case of the sum of the whole being greater than its parts. McCarthy's exploration of fate underpins the entire saga and creates somewhat of an extra dimension to the world that lies within these pages.

I personally enjoyed The Crossing the most out of the three books as it contained some of the most memorable moments i have come across in writing. The mood is dark, and the world unforgiving but the journey investigates some of the deepest questions one may ask with poise and finesse.

To read all three books requires quite a commitment (a bit over a thousand pages), but it is absolutely worth the investment. If you are looking for something that is both thought provoking and beautifully written The Border Crossing is thoroughly rewarding adventure.

I have just finished All the Pretty Horses now halfway through the Crossing.

All the Pretty Horses is a rip-roaring western tale of two teenage boys travel in Old Mexico on horseback working for a wealthy rancher, first love, and coming to grips with political power and corruption. Be prepared to translate Spanish to English if you are not bi-lingual. McCarthy is not going to do it for you.

My father was a Colorado rancher and horsemen and trainer in the western style. I grew up riding, so the early western cowboy ethos has always been an attraction. In my experience a rider and horse can form a bond and many trainers are highly skilled; however, I do not subscribe to the mystical soulful relationship McCarthy attributes between horses and his character John Grady. This relationship between horse and equestrian sounds other worldly to me and I am sure it would to my father who was an expert judge of horse flesh. The "horse whisperer" is largely a fiction in my experience.

The West Texas language, the descriptions of the landscape, sprinkled with philosophical gems make the writing very appealing and hard to put down. The first book of the trilogy is much more than the relationship between horse and rider.

Parafrasando un famoso titolo di McCarthy, questi non sono libri per persone impazienti. Tre storie indipendenti, di cui la terza è l’ideale proseguimento delle prime due, ma potrebbe anche essere letta da sola. Allora perché metterle insieme in un volume da oltre 1000 pagine? Perché per leggere queste storie serve un passo, un ritmo; e quando lo hai acquisito difficilmente te ne vuoi separare. Tre storie fatte di freddo, polvere, sangue, cavalli, alcool, notti all’aperto, dialoghi minimi e dialoghi sul senso del mondo, dove per pagine e pagine accadono fatti minimi, ma tutto ciò che accade è esattamente funzionale alla tragedia che puntualmente si compirà. Tragedie annunciate, epiloghi dichiarati, personaggi che non si sottraggono ad un destino cattivo, anzi lo cercano, convinti di fare la cosa più giusta. Una scrittura magistrale, che non si preoccupa di rendere la vita facile al lettore ma di lo getta letteralmente nel mezzo della storia. Nessuno ci spiega chi sono i personaggi, dove siamo, cosa è accaduto ieri, gli antefatti e le premesse. Noi siamo dentro, e osserviamo ciò che accade, ascoltiamo le parole, conosciamo i protagonisti per come agiscono e per ciò che dicono. Ci vuole pazienza per leggere questo libro, ma il premio per chi resiste è una cavalcata di libertà, un’immersione in un flusso narrativo maestoso, un assoluto appagamento dei sensi e della mente.

I really liked these books individually, but in that capacity there were things that kept me from absolutely flipping over them.

With All the Pretty Horses, I just wasn't that into John Grady Cole's character - a bit too good, too easily admirable. The book gave us two other significant characters so it's not just the "JGC is awesome" show, but he's so obviously the superior product to them that it's hard to fully rally behind them even for contrarians like myself who couldn't fully get behind the romanticism of the main protagonist. That said, everything else about it is unimpeachable. The prose is as evocative as anything you'll encounter, the landscape and horse scenes that the book is known for very much included. The dialog between the main characters is likewise on point throughout, something that holds throughout the trilogy. Likewise, the Mexico of this book is a truly immersive place.

The Crossing shares a lot of that - the sharp dialog between friends (or in this case brothers), the vivid descriptiveness, the whittling away of a young man's innocence. Yet in spite of that it's also a totally different beast. This follows the unwritten rule that the middle of a trilogy is the darkest, even if Cities of the Plain doesn't exactly let The Crossing run away with that title. But this is the most challenging of the three, which honestly works both for and against it.

The Mexico that new lead Billy Parnham repeatedly ventures down to is a scarier, more surreal place than the one John Grady encountered, even allowing that things got pretty dark for him, too. McCarthy's prose absorbs this element - sentences get significantly longer, knowledge (?) is often distilled in the form of hallucinogenic rants, and the amount of Spanish at times skyrockets. On the downside, I only really enjoyed one of the three rants (the...blind guy's), and if you're not enjoying them they really grind the book to a halt for pages at a time. On a whole, the middle of the book meanders a bit here and there.

That said, everything up through Billy's first return to the US is as good as anything I've read - the early scenes trying to trap the wolf and Billy's journey with it into the fever dream of Mexico is practically mind-blowing for both our young hero and us as readers. I've rarely felt so transported to a place as those frozen, lonely mountains the Parnhams make their home near. While it's true that things are less consistent after that, there's still a ton to love as Billy is repeatedly stripped of what matters to him - his interactions with the unerringly kind locals he encounters are great, as is the troubled bond with brother Boyd, and once in a while McCarthy drops a masterful action sequence on us to balance the more languid parts. The story is phenomenal, maybe my favorite of the three, it's just occasionally marred by stylistic choices, in my opinion.

What boosts it all to five stars is Cities of Plain, a book that outside of the context of the others wouldn't be nearly as powerful, but coming after Books 1 and 2 serves as a nigh-perfect conclusion. Our two leads have now met and formed a strong friendship despite a near-decade age gap, and are living a fairly settled life among like-minded souls, though reality and the second half of the twentieth century are very much encroaching on their way of life from the corners. McCarthy seems to go out of his way to keep the other cowboys on the farm likable but indistinct for the most part, which just further serves that the boys have found their people. As far as distinct new characters, we do get ranch owner Mac, his elderly father in law who's struggling to deal with his increasing senility with dignity, and Eduardo, the slick, violent pimp who serves as the story's villain.

Needless to say, things don't stay calm and happy too long, and established characteristics and tendencies show back up in Cole & Parnham, to painful effect. As things build towards the heartbreaker ending, even images and the like begin to recur, possibly supporting some of fatalistic philosophies Billy's encounters through his adventures. By the end, he remained my favorite character, but with time running out on the book I suddenly gained a new respect and appreciation for his younger foil. Cities of the Plain also features perhaps the most exciting action sequence of the series, too, in the form of a graphic wild dog hunt. All of this is to say the concluding book does everything that the previous books did well, leaves out the flaws that kept The Crossing from perfection, and provides satisfying ends to both characters' very different journeys. The brief epilogue really tugs at the heartstrings, though thankfully in a very different way than the proper end, which more tears at them.

All told, a very immersive trilogy where each book is to some extent capable of being read on its own (circumstances determined that I read The Crossing first, actually), but which I would encourage everyone to take in their intended order to appreciate the thematic development properly, both for the characters and the way of life they're so devoted to. These are three excellent books that, taken as a whole, transcend even their individual accomplishments (well, save maybe that first section of The Crossing...that was something else) and form one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've had. Can't wait to finally get to Blood Meridian.

Na het recente overlijden van Cormac McCarthy wou ik zeker ‘De weg’ lezen, de roman waarmee hij in 2007 de Pulitzer prijs voor fictie haalde. Dankzij mijn vrouw belandde echter eerst de lijvige Grenstrilogie, een bundeling van drie romans die McCarthy van 1992 tot 1998 schreef, op mijn leestafel. Duizend pagina’s lang. Een uitdaging, maar wat voor leesplezier!
Cormac McCarthy toont zich in deze drie gebundelde romans als een meesterverteller die op een weergaloze manier een wereld schetst die niet meer bestaat en waarvan we misschien enkel in onze dromen kunnen veronderstellen dat ze ooit echt heeft bestaan. Alles speelt zich anno jaren 30 en 40 van de vorige eeuw af in het weergaloze landschap van de grens tussen Texas, New Mexico en Arizona enerzijds en Mexico anderzijds . John Grady Cole (in ‘Al de mooie paarden’) en Billy Parham (in ‘De Grens’) en beiden samen in de laatste roman (‘Steden van de vlakte’) zijn twee jonge cowboys die allebei, elk gedreven door hun eigen drijfveren, de grens naar Mexico oversteken om daar in een wereld te belanden die zowel nieuwe horizonten als gruwelijke uitdagingen te bieden heeft.
McCarthy kruipt diep in de huid van zijn hoofdfiguren. Hun zoektocht, hun verlangens, hun liefdes, hun twijfels, hun ontgoochelingen worden ook die van de lezer. En niet alleen met hen kun je meeleven maar ook met de dieren, paarden en wolven, waarmee ze omgaan krijg je een bijna fysieke band. Je moet het maar kunnen om zoiets in woorden te gieten. En dan vergeet ik hier nog bijna zijn zintuiglijke beschrijving van die prachtige natuur waarin zich dit alles afspeelt.
McCarthy lardeert dit af en toe, vooral in het tweede boek en op het einde van het derde boek met filosofisch diepgaande verhalen van toevallige passanten die je als lezer even uit je comfortzone halen en die je misschien een paar keer moet herlezen om ze helemaal tot je te laten doordringen.
Maar let op, vergis je niet, van dit universum dat geschetst wordt, maakt ook gruwelijke wreedheid deel uit. Ook dit is immers deel van het mensbeeld dat McCarthy ons schetst.

Cowboy quest stories leavened with a heaping slice of existential despair embodied by the seeping knowledge that the way of life as you know it is disintegrating as you live it? Sign me up for the drive!

I don't get the sense that McCarthy wanted to write a cowboy story (or stories) as much as write a long dissertation on why there's no way to write a cowboy story anymore. Or at least why he's not going to write one. A lot of the elements are present, men in hats, guns, the windswept scenery, bandits and wolves and horses but it's like someone put them together in the wrong order, resulting in something horribly downbeat, a series of ingredients left out for far too long and already starting to show signs of decay. It can make for immersive reading and at times even gripping reading, but it's not exactly feel-good stuff.

This compact hardcover brings together three of his more famous novels, one of which was turned into a movie. There aren't so much a trilogy as connected thematically, with the main characters of the first two books joining forces in the third book to finally see the idea of the Wild West as we know it to the great dirt nap, or at least helping it come to the realization that it's been crippled and needs to be put down for its own good.

With that cheery introduction, let's get to the good times:

"All the Pretty Horses": This was the one I've heard of, mostly because they made it into an apparently not that great movie that I've never seen. This on some level is probably the most accessible of the bunch even though the prose style doesn't quite lend itself toward that at first glance. John Grady Cole, faced with the prospect of his ranch being sold, heads into Mexico with his best friend to find work wrangling things, presumably cattle. Among other things, they meet a potentially psychotic teenager, John falls in love and they get a tour of the Mexican prison system in a way that doesn't require paying admission. None of it, other than a stab at a tragic love story, could be considered pleasant or even life-affirming.

Except. The prose in this novel struck me the most out of the three, even though the style isn't that much different. It may be the shock of the new, or it may be that McCarthy has a tighter control over his looseness, if that makes any sense. His sentences come across as layered fever dreams, knotted and running into each other before suddenly untangling into glorious descriptions of the scenery. The lacking of punctuation elevates what could be a story of routine melodrama into something a bit more epic and mythological, three young men touring the crumbling ruins of an old way of life, trying to find their way inside of it even as it attempts to chew them up. It's brutal in parts, and unsparing in that way that cluster bombs are. McCarthy depicts all the degradations that the boys go through in prison with a jaundiced eye but the summary execution of someone is handled off-screen with a minimum of fuss, as if the book was too concerned with other matters to even bother with someone being snuffed out.

None of it would work at all if John Grady wasn't drawn so rigidly, defined in opposition to a system that keeps changing shape to smother him. Absolutely no one is on his side and he basically survives by being unyielding, implacably refusing to bend no matter how much of a good idea it seems. He has poor judgement in women but an unswerving moral bend and his conviction to not only do the right thing but see the right thing be done drives the core of the novel and in that sense he seems to be attempting to maintain the spirit of the plains and the old West through sheer will and gravitational pull alone.

But if there's some small hint of romance in "All the Pretty Horses", "The Crossing" dispenses with all that entirely to go frolicking with wolves. Actual wolves, as opposed to metaphorical wolves. The description of the plot for the novel leads one to believe that the entire novel could be titled "A Boy and His Muzzled Wolf" when in reality it takes up a very small part of it. Instead it features a series of jaunts into Mexico by first young Billy Parham solo and later joined by his brother Boyd. The first part of it involves a wolf, the second part involves a journey for revenge and the remainder deals with the aftermath of that revenge and an attempt to get some closure where the wound has been already cauterized. Nothing makes sense, and all he can do is cope. But even the act of coping could change him utterly.

It's a harder book to get into. For one, the prose here seems scaled back into something resembling normal and while the descriptions are still vivid, the rhythm lacks the headrush fire of the first novel. Where it does succeed is turning Mexico into a kind of alien fairyland, a place that is heaped in mystery and mythology, an aura that can be felt every time Billy and (later) Boyd make the crossing into that other territory. It's not quite as simple as going to a place where people speak a different language but a place where all the rules are different, with an internal logic that has to be deciphered before any progress can be made. Since the book tends to focus more on Billy becoming a man (or "not a boy") the plot is a bit more rambling than the first novel, with the story lurching from point to point like a series of short stories featuring the same people. In portions it speeds up to attain a kind of power, an attack by bandits, a family revelation, a harrowing search but it never builds momentum for very long, leading the less patient to probably wonder "where is he going with this?" The fact that large amounts of the dialogue is in Spanish doesn't help . . . it highlights the Otherness of Mexico since (at least for me, being monolingual) having great swaths of the book rendered incomprehensible except via context (which is possible) makes you feel as if you've stumbled into a place where you really don't belong.

But it's necessary as a bridge to get us to "Cities of the Plain", where all the themes come together just in time to come joyfully crashing down. John Grady and Billy are working on the same ranch where things seem to be winding down due to a drought. The spectre of the US Army hovers nearby, never seen but existing in sideways dialogue, ready to take over the lands at any moment. But everything seems to be going well, with John Grady furthering his skill at breaking horses ("All the Pretty Horses" revealed him to be a master horse whisperer, which probably looks better on your resume than "failed romantic" although "survived Mexican prison with only minor stab wounds" could be a useful life skill) and Billy rarely mentioning that he used to have a brother and a wolf, neither of which are necessary for anyone to know but might be nice conversation starters for those long nights out on the range.

Of course, a book about everyone having a good time on a ranch wouldn't be as much fun for the rest of us and fortunately while John Grady has learned many life lessons, making good choices in the world of romance clearly wasn't one of them as he falls in love with not just a prostitute, but one with a seizure disorder. And not just an epileptic lady of the streets, but one whose pimp might have fallen in love with her. Oh, and did I mention the pimp has a nasty violent streak? All the ingredients for a tragic ending are present and this elevates the book considerably over the one before it, making the entire trilogy's tendency to suddenly tangent into philosophical digressions easier to take when the aura of doom hovers over everything. The presence of John Grady helps as well, his steady intractability and sureness contrasting with the "live and let crumble" attitude of everyone else on the ranch. Once a plan takes hold for him to marry the young lady and get her away from the life she leads, we lurch into a plodding escalation that verges on the Biblical, everyone fairly certain that none of this will end well but unable to stop themselves from ensuring it ends even worse.

The literary quirks that color McCarthy's work, the elevation of the mundane into the mythical, discussions of dreams that practically scream "This is fraught with meaning", the desperate circling of the characters in such a fashion that reminds you of nothing more than a drain set over a garbage disposal, all of that comes into play here but with the entire book focused on the notion of "This is the end of a way of life" it means that every stray line of dialogue becomes twisted toward that end, regardless of whether it wants to or not, adding weight to all these circumstances that can't be entirely ignored. It turns a story from a cautionary tale of why bringing a knife to a knife fight is more useful than you'd think into a mediation on what happens when no one bothers with knife fights anymore. Nobody ends up happy but, as the song says, even if things had worked out they probably wouldn't have been happy anyway because the life that feeds that happiness is disappearing.

That disintegration is heightened in the epilogue, picking up with one of the characters years later, in a world that he has no place in but may still have a place for him. "Elegiac" seems too easy a word to describe it, but after reading a good chunk of three novels that seem to be funerals for a body that hasn't died yet it's considerably more optimistic than anything that came before it. The people who can't adapt are better off staying behind, it seems to be suggesting, because the new contours of the world would have left them no room to breathe anyway. The ones that survive are the people that allow their bones to be broken so they can fit inside and keep on living. It's a trade-off perhaps, and if the price of life is the sawing pain of the sharp edges of the shattered splinters inside that never quite goes away, well, they'll take that as a last reminder of the world they once had and consider it a trade made fair.

I love these books! I first read All the Pretty Horses in high school, and liked it so much I started reading his other books. These are my favorites of his, by far. I enjoy his writing style, and the southwest setting always makes me feel some sort of wanderlust...it would be nice to have a lifestyle so free of possessions and responsibility, but then again, I do like the comforts of modern society. These books are all rather violent, but if you can get past it, you'll appreciate one of the greatest authors ever.