I came to McCarthy's celebrated Border Trilogy already a convert to the author's work. I rate 'No country for old men' among the best books I have read. I am less enthusiastic about 'The road', yet it is a powerful and unforgettable read.

'All the Pretty Horses" is the first volume in The Border Trilogy. The story opens in Texas shortly after World War 2, at a ranch near San Angelo where part of a traditional American way of life is coming to an end. It is 1949 and schoolboy John Grady Cole is at his family's ranch house to see his grandfather lying in state on the eve of his funeral. A storm is gathering, and the funeral itself takes place in a howling wind that blows the preacher's words away.

The opening scenes conjure the ghosts of America's past, the Comanche trail before the white men came and tamed the land and fenced it in. They introduce some of the great themes of McCarthy's writing: individual isolation; the vastness of landscapes; change and the passing of ways of life; freedom and migration; fate and destiny in a godless world.

Shortly after the funeral, under the darkness of night, Cole sneaks out of the house to meet up with his 17 years old cousin and neighbour Lacey Rawlins. Together they head west and south towards and across the border, into lawless Mexico and whatever it may hold for them. It is as though they have passed back in time a hundred years or more. Only the Comanches have gone.

The story unfolds in just four long chapters, and in the first one the fugitives move slowly on the trail from camp to camp, stopping at the occasional settlement, crossing prairies and rivers, drifting from one chance encounter to another. Somewhere along the way Cole and Rawlins are joined by a crazy young lad who may or may not be sixteen years old and who may or may not be named Jimmy Blevins. He rides a magnificent bay colt like he was born in the saddle.

The young men's travels stop when they meet up with some vaqueros herding cattle on the remote plains of Coahuila, and they join up to work at breaking in wild horses. Their picaresque journey reaches a hiatus at this point. In the second chapter we learn a lot about breaking horses, and Rawlins drifts from sight for a while, as Cole pursues his infatuation with the hacendado's daughter Alejandra. Events then take a bad turn, and through the last two chapters the dream becomes a nightmare. The Americans find that Mexico has its own rules of power and influence and McCarthy takes us deep into the country's heart of darkness.

From its beginnings in recent history, 'All the Pretty Horses" develops into a latter-day Western, a tale of riders and horses and bad men and gunfights. By the end of the novel Cole, clad in a serape, has attained an almost mythical presence that evokes the Clint Eastwood of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, a "pale rider passing with blanket and rifle", later described as like an "apparition out of the vanished past". The novel begins and ends with a death and a funeral and a storm brewing, and leaves us with a telling image of the native indians who once had this land to themselves.

'The Crossing' is the second volume of the trilogy and was first published in 1994, two years after the opening volume 'All the Pretty Horses'. I was surprised to find - after the open ending of the previous novel - that it is a completely separate story and not a sequel.

However, 'The Crossing' shares a number of striking similarities with 'All the Pretty Horses'. Like the first volume, it is a story told in four acts and has as its central character a teenage youth who must ride alone on an epic journey across the border into Mexico, into a hostile land that time seems to have forgotten.

Here the protagonist is a 16-year old youth named Billy Parham who, as the story opens, lives with his parents and his younger brother Boyd in the wilderness of Hildago County in New Mexico, close to the Mexican border. The story is set just before and during World War 2, although you wouldn't know this from the opening chapter describing the harsh wintry mountain landscape of the Peloncillos. Much later in the story Billy will stumble on the fact that his country is embroiled in a global war, but by then Cormac McCarthy has taken his characters - and the reader - into a world that could have existed a hundred or more years before.

Billy Parham's abandons the world in which he has been raised to strike out alone into the wilderness and the vanishing world of old America, in which he finds great natural beauty but also an increasing indifference to his fate. Thus begins a series of journeys involving a number of random encounters with people on the trail. Many of the people met have their own stories to relate, and so we are treated to a number of tales within a wider tale - some long, others no more than short vignettes.

As in 'All the Pretty Horses', events in 'The Crossing' take a dramatic turn in the second chapter, leading into a dark and dangerous world. Billy returns to Mexico with his young brother Boyd on a second journey, this time a mission of vengeance and redemption. As in the earlier novel, the travellers are joined by a young stranger - this time a girl - who draws them into events and relationships with unforeseen consequences.

There are so many similarities between the first two novels of this trilogy. Both involve the theft of horses and a mission to recover them, and we spend a great deal of time in the saddle in this pursuit. In each, the central character has a cold, distant relationship with his father and feels an undefined yet urgent need to break away, before a homecoming of sorts. Like John Grady Cole in the earlier novel, Billy Parham takes on the ways and appearance of a man from an earlier time, "...something in off the wild mesas, something out of the past. Ragged, dirty, hungry in eye and belly. Totally unspoken for."

'The Crossing' echoes the great tradition of American literature, particularly Jack London and Ernest Hemingway - the opening chapter, in particular, is reminiscent of London's 'White Fang', while the narrative arc recalls Hemingway's 'The Old Man and The Sea' in its account of doomed enterprise. The picaresque nature of the journey, with its numerous diversionary tales, follows the path of Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. McCarthy also shares Herman Melville's love of detailed descriptions of people at work, and the technical processes they apply: at one point he gives us a detailed account of how a doctor treats a gunshot wound. It is as if he doesn't want to waste any of the information he has gleaned from his researches.

I found in 'The Crossing' the same qualities that I admired in 'All the Pretty Horses': a writing style that, at its best, can be extremely beautiful and lyrical; an emotional engagement with his characters that is often profoundly moving; a deep love of landscape and country and of times gone by; an appreciation of the best and the worst of humanity. This is a book that I enjoyed immensely, perhaps more so than 'All the Pretty Horses'. Its ending is just as bleak though, as McCarthy leaves us with an image of despair, a young man sat on the white line of the highway, with no direction home, with nowhere to go.

The final volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, 'Cities of the Plain' binds together the separate narratives of the first two volumes in a fitting finale to those stories.

It is 1952 and our story opens in a whorehouse in a Mexican town where three Americans have taken refuge from a storm. We already know two of the group from the first two volumes in this trilogy: John Grady, whom we left riding alone into a desert sunset at the end of 'All the Pretty Horses'; and Billy Parham, whom we last saw slumped on an empty highway with nowhere to go at the end of 'The Crossing'.

What is startling from the beginning is the realisation that McCarthy's protagonists - so adept at horsemanship in the earlier volumes of the trilogy - now travel by beat-up truck, as they work an old cattle ranch in New Mexico, close to the border, in a land as desolate and unyielding as those they traversed in earlier times. Every crucial journey in this novel is undertaken on four wheels, in a truck or taxi cab. This is in stark contrast to the first two novels in which the protagonists move only on horseback. It feels like times have changed.

The war has changed everything. The ranch on which Billy and John Grady work is struggling to survive and looks set to be sold to the army for military use. Billy has lost something along the way. He no longer wants what he once thought he wanted, now he doesn't know what he wants. John Grady, meanwhile, finds what he wants: he has fallen for a young whore in a Mexican brothel and tracks her down and tries to entice her away. You know this is a story that can have no happy ending, and McCarthy does not keep us guessing as to the outcome: he signposts us to where this venture is going and a sense of doom hangs over proceedings, like a vulture perched on a dead tree.

McCarthy continues to explore his familiar themes of fate and destiny, and his characters grapple with their thoughts on choice and predestination, in a world in which perhaps all events are already mapped out and everyone must play out their predetermined role.

'Cities of the Plains' follows the structure of previous volumes in the trilogy, the story being told in four long chapters, each a separate act of the narrative. However, here the chapters are broken into smaller, episodic segments as we jump from location to location. This fractured narrative leaves behind the epic sweep of the first two volumes, and the story has a more traditional narrative structure as it develops. While I felt this novel lacks some of the grace of the first two volumes, it still tells a compelling and powerful story and is full of the beauty, kindness, cruelty, violence and evil that characterise this trilogy. It spans the best and the worst of humanity.

Unlike the earlier volumes, 'Cities of the Plains' has an Epilogue, which starts with another journey on horseback into the unknown and the reader anticipates another existential trip where time seems to stand still. McCarthy here shows great sleight of hand and suddenly we are thrust forward in the space of a few words into the twenty-first century (well, 2002 to be exact - four years after the novel was published). A jump of some 50 years, a leap into the future.

Billy must now be 78 years old, eking out a living as a film extra, wandering the land again but this time without his horse. Even his riding boots don't last and must be discarded, his last link with the open trails now gone. Finally, McCarthy gives us a tale within the tale, and a dream within a dream, a last philosophical exchange that leaves Billy - and the reader - struggling to understand. There is no redemption, no resolution, no neat tying of loose ends. But maybe a recognition of a man's identity and purpose, a homecoming of sorts for the restless wanderer.

McCarthy is not an easy writer to recommend, as I recognise that some readers will not tolerate his style and authorial idiosyncrasies, let alone his particularly American subject matter and themes. He never uses a semi-colon, or quotation marks for dialogue; the reader has to work out what is spoken, and by whom. He seldom uses as much as a comma, and occasionally his sentences can be very long. When it works, as it usually does, it can be extremely beautiful and lyrical. When it does not, it is clumsy and irritating. I must confess I am also irritated by McCarthy's frequent use of Spanish dialogue without translation, and his very wide vocabulary - often specialised and technical, describing flora, fauna and geography - had me turning to the dictionary more times than I would have liked. Nevertheless, I enjoyed immensely the lyricism with which he tells these stories. His prose can be rather clunky at times when he veers into abstract thought, but mostly the writing is vivid and spare and poetic.

Non so, penso proprio che McCarthy non faccia per me. Ho letto La strada, osannatissimo capolavoro, tre anni fa, e l'ho trovato insulso e banale, oltre che noiosissimo. Per un po' ho messo l'autore da parte, ritenendo semplicemente che non rientrasse nelle mie corde. E tuttavia, restava uno dei grandi pilastri della narrativa americana, da me profondamente amata, ed ho dunque deciso di dargli una seconda possibilità, buttandomi sul genere che probabilmente più di ogni altro contraddistingue McCarthy, anche perché tendo a trovare una maggiore compiutezza nei romanzi più corposi, in grado di trasmettere significati più completi, e dunque ho deciso di propendere per i tre romanzi della Trilogia della frontiera.
Eeeee... Niente, non è scattata la scintilla. Trovo la prosa di McCarthy sciatta in molti punti, piana e brulla, ed eccessivamente lirica in momenti che non ne vedrebbero alcuna necessità. I personaggi sono carta velina, e affermano ripetutamente di amare la natura incontaminata, quando in realtà questo dalla scrittura si percepisce a stento. Ciò che resta è una terribile confusione geografica, un'indefinitezza, un senso di incompiutezza di trama e di identità dei personaggi, dall'età risibile e la personalità inesistente, ed è del tutto assente anche la rocambolesca serie di avventure tradizionalmente caratteristica del genere. (E quando c'è, è ovviamente stereotipatissima e banale). Gli unici momenti che ho veramente apprezzato sono stati i racconti e le leggende narrati dai vari contadini e proprietari terrieri che John Grady Cole e Billy incontrano sul loro cammino.
Ah, altra cosa: chi ha pensato che lasciare le parti in spagnolo non tradotte fosse una buona idea???? Interrompono costantemente il fluire del romanzo costringendo a un'inutile decodificazione, quando sarebbe stata sufficiente una banale nota a piè di pagina.

As good as a book gets, but don't expect any fun! This trilogy is harsh beyond belief. He is cruel to the reader's sentiments as much as to the characters. The setting is 1940s southern USA. The border is not just that between the US and Mexico, but also between the old rural southern way of life and the new America that is rolling down from the north, and also between the (more or less) civilised US and the primitive nature of Mexico at that time (as the author depicts it), full of kind strangers and brutally savage crooks. I suspect it is a caricature of what it was like then, but most caricatures have some basis in the truth.

Also brush up yr Spanish before reading: he makes no effort to translate and there is a fair amount of dialogue south of the border.

Depressing but a brilliantly written trilogy.

The last volume is good, but some of the late dialogue is a bit hangy compared to the philosophizing in The Crossing, which was priceless. The naive hope and brutal occurrences in Cities of the Plain kind of overshadow that in the first two volumes. If you haven't read these books, you are missing something rare in novels.