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Buy only if you have the first two, 13. Juli 2000
When I found out the two heroes of the first two books, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, were united in this one, I went out of my mind to read it. Unfortunately this book is neither as exciting as "All the Pretty Horses" or as philosophically rich as "The Crossing." McCarthy's concentrating on the girl prostitute reveals his weakness in understanding a woman's viewpoint. "Cities of the Plain" works best in tandem with the first two books. Taking the trilogy as a whole, the necessity of this girl becomes clear, though that's up to the reader to pick up. The epilogue, which is really the epilogue for the whole trilogy, indicates the meaning of John Grady, of the women he loved -- and more importantly, the meaning of Billy. Get "Cities of the Plain" as the key to "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing"; read the other two first.
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COMPLEXITY ROPED IN, 9. Juni 2000
It took a while to get around to this one. My experience with this writer has always been that you don't pick up one of his books purely for entertainment. In fact, the complexity of the telling and the tale in parts one and two of this trilogy approach Faulkner.I found CITIES, in terms of plot and style, to be less complex, more reader-friendly. However, even writing in this more traditional sense, McCarthy maintains the edge that sets him apart from most of his American contemporaries. The simplicity and poetry of the phrasing is still there, the marvelous descriptions, the dead perfect dialogue, still crisp and efficient. And even though you know what's going to happen if you've read the earlier works, you can't help but be tantalized and magnetized and pulled along. The suspense and style that Larry Brown emulates in his southern underbelly novels is raised a couple levels by the hand of this master writer. In creating this more readable conclusion to the Border Trilogy, McCarthy may have blown his chance at the Nobel (rumors of his shortlisting abound among the writers I've spoken to). But with CITIES, he allows us to go along for the ride with little more than a dusting off of that rusty Spanish.
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pleasantly surprised, 6. Mai 2000
I had heard bad things about this book, so I was hesitant about reading it. And to be honest, I was disappointed to see John Grady Cole and Billy Parham united. Billy wasn't much of a surprise, but after the end of ALL THE PRETTY HORSES I didn't expect to see John Grady again. Eventually I was able to put my preconceptions aside and discovered that I was reading a marvelous book. The essence of ranch life is captured in all its painful detail. The death of this way of life is felt with every word, and the entire plot of the novel seems to be a metaphor for that extinction. The lyricism of McCarthy's writing was ever-present. Vastly superior to THE CROSSING.
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Don't like it? Have it your own ignorant way., 2. Mai 2000
Von Ein Kunde
Lots of reviews here complain about this book not having the drive or originality of the first two books in the trilogy. I'd have to agree, since this book just repeats the plots of the first two in a deliberate and symmetrical way. As Marx said, history happens twice, the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Once again John Grady stupidly decides that he'll be able to save a Mexican girl, and once again Billy loses a brother.In some ways this is a really ruthless book. The figure of the cowboy is given no possible redemption, no future. But what were we expecting? From the first it was clear that guys like John Grady and Billy are unforgivably short-sighted. They never "see" Mexico, they only fantasize about it (something for all you people who complained about the Spanish to think about--get a damn dictionary, for pity's sake!) They think of themselves as masters of all they survey, and as a direct result they end up dead or in despair. And yet, and yet, and yet . . . This is also a very serene and forgiving book that captures, more than any other western I can think of, the reality of the cowboy as worker--starved, broke, hanging on to the ranching life out of some kind of genuine love. If you get bored reading about the details of ranch life, just go read some pulp cowbody romance with shoot-outs and steamy sex scenes and get it over with. McCarthy doesn't tell us which of his two visions of the cowboy is the true one, but he does leave them separate with no attempt to solve the problem he's laid out. I don't know whether this is good or bad, but McCarthy has brought a clarity and honesty to the Western that it was badly in need of.
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Inconclusively bum finale, 12. April 2000
I'd read the first twobooks and was anxiously awaiting the publication of this lastinstallment in the Border Trilogy... the first thing I noticed was theodd choice of title: "Cities of the Plain" was for years and years the favorite title for English translations of Proust's "Sodom et Gomorrah" colume of "Remembrance of Things Past" -- something not likely to have passed McCarthy by (i.e., as a writer, unless I was Kathy Acker and feeling particularly postmodern, I can't imagine naming one of my novels "The Tin Drum", irregardless of the fact that "Die Blechtrommel" was the title Gunter Grass gave it in German) -- if you don't get the Biblical allusion, the title must seem fairly straightforward: cities, Great Plains, cowhands, etc. But the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah seems so utterly off: Billy Parham as Lot, and John Grady as Lot's wife, turned to a pillar of sand? El Paso as Sodom, and Juarez as Gomorrah? And so on, nothing really matching. The metaphor's too vague...Grady -- and to a lesser extent, Parham -- seem to use their dreams, their unspoken fantasies, to project the world they live in only a precarious step or two ahead of where they're already at. It rarely reflects their surroundings more than haphazardly, gets them into all sorts of trouble, and is resolved for Grady in tragedy, vengeance, and death, and for Parham in perhaps the most oblique of all the sinister Mexican parables with which McCarthy has so generously salted and peppered the whole trilogy. That projection -- that use of the world as a screen, simultaneous with the reader using the book in the same way -- which worked so well in the first two books, through the characters of Grady and Parham as boys, in many ways precisely because they were boys -- doesn't work particularly well here. They're not boys any longer, their characters don't scan as boys' characters within the situations and dialogue we find them in, and yet they don't seem to be adults. Or older. They seem less like people than spirits, old ghosts divorced too long from the tickings of flesh to be particularly reliable witnesses to the waning of their personal and historo-geographical eras. Add to this the terminally arhthymic heartbeat of the book -- the time signatures of the plot change so rapidly and patternlessly one rarely gets any sense of the passing of real time -- and you have an unwieldy, misshapen appendage of a Volume 3 which completes the trilogy with all the grace and continuity of a pair of donkey's ears protruding from a human head. I'm not saying it couldn't work just as perfectly as here it fails, in some different setting, as a book on its own, as the opener of a trilogy. And I'm not saying there's not some stunning prose here (though by this time one takes it for granted coming from McCarthy), not to mention the beautiful, odd surprise of the epilogue (marred only by the aforementioned overlong parable of the dream of the man dreaming of the sacrifical altar, etc.) -- but it remains a deeply, deeply inconsistent and flawed book, full of inexcusably rushed transitions, often paperthin characterizations, and cross-cultural interchanges diluted nearly to the point of parodies (there are Mexican voices here that ring as cliched as Uncle Remus did in "Song of the South") I've searched the texts and my mind for some pattern or reason behind the ways McCarthy chose to carry out (undermine, sabotage) this otherwise seismically-affecting trilogy's conclusion, and I must admit, if such are there, they go entirely by me. The final feeling was a let-down -- and -- and what? Is he trying to say that about human life? And yet everything else in the books would deny that, as suffuse as they are with hyperventilated observation, flora and fauna and natural wonder, third ways, and third ways' thirds ways (fourth ways), and meditations on life and death and love and solitude and the relationships between men and horses. I was left scratching my head. END
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Inconclusively bum finale, 12. April 2000
("The scorching memoirs of young man-about-town Jack Saul. With his shocking dalliances with the lords and ladies of British high society, Jack's positively sinful escapades grow wilder with every chapter!" -- amazon.com synopsis of James Jennings' "Sins of the Cities of the Plain")I'd read the first two books and was anxiously awaiting the publication of this last installment in the Border Trilogy... the first thing I noticed was the odd choice of title: "Cities of the Plain" was for years and years the favorite title for English translations of Proust's "Sodom et Gomorrah" colume of "Remembrance of Things Past" -- something not likely to have passed McCarthy by (i.e., as a writer, unless I was Kathy Acker and feeling particularly postmodern, I can't imagine naming one of my novels "The Tin Drum", irregardless of the fact that "Die Blechtrommel" was the title Gunter Grass gave it in German) -- if you don't get the Biblical allusion, the title must seem fairly straightforward: cities, Great Plains, cowhands, etc. But the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah seems so utterly off: Billy Parham as Lot, and John Grady as Lot's wife, turned to a pillar of sand? El Paso as Sodom, and Juarez as Gomorrah? And so on, nothing really matching. The metaphor's too vague... Grady -- and to a lesser extent, Parham -- seem to use their dreams, their unspoken fantasies, to project the world they live in only a precarious step or two ahead of where they're already at. It rarely reflects their surroundings more than haphazardly, gets them into all sorts of trouble, and is resolved for Grady in tragedy, vengeance, and death, and for Parham in perhaps the most oblique of all the sinister Mexican parables with which McCarthy has so generously salted and peppered the whole trilogy. That projection -- that use of the world as a screen, simultaneous with the reader using the book in the same way -- which worked so well in the first two books, through the characters of Grady and Parham as boys, in many ways precisely because they were boys -- doesn't work particularly well here. They're not boys any longer, their characters don't scan as boys' characters within the situations and dialogue we find them in, and yet they don't seem to be adults. Or older. They seem less like people than spirits, old ghosts divorced too long from the tickings of flesh to be particularly reliable witnesses to the waning of their personal and historo-geographical eras. Add to this the terminally arhthymic heartbeat of the book -- the time signatures of the plot change so rapidly and patternlessly one rarely gets any sense of the passing of real time -- and you have an unwieldy, misshapen appendage of a Volume 3 which completes the trilogy with all the grace and continuity of a pair of donkey's ears protruding from a human head. I'm not saying it couldn't work just as perfectly as here it fails, in some different setting, as a book on its own, as the opener of a trilogy. And I'm not saying there's not some stunning prose here (though by this time one takes it for granted coming from McCarthy), not to mention the beautiful, odd surprise of the epilogue (marred only by the aforementioned overlong parable of the dream of the man dreaming of the sacrifical altar, etc.) -- but it remains a deeply, deeply inconsistent and flawed book, full of inexcusably rushed transitions, often paperthin characterizations, and cross-cultural interchanges diluted nearly to the point of parodies (there are Mexican voices here that ring as cliched as Uncle Remus did in "Song of the South") I've searched the texts and my mind for some pattern or reason behind the ways McCarthy chose to carry out (undermine, sabotage) this otherwise seismically-affecting trilogy's conclusion, and I must admit, if such are there, they go entirely by me. The final feeling was a let-down -- and -- and what? Is he trying to say that about human life? And yet everything else in the books would deny that, as suffuse as they are with hyperventilated observation, flora and fauna and natural wonder, third ways, and third ways' thirds ways (fourth ways), and meditations on life and death and love and solitude and the relationships between men and horses. I was left scratching my head.
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I'm flying solo, 31. Dezember 1999
Well, I suppose I will be the one to stand against the stream on this one. McCarthy was a little disappointing in his third installment of the Border Trilogy. It was well written, but he fails in Cities much the way other writers fail in making their books much too predictable. All the Pretty Horses was excellent because you did not know where you would end. By the end of The Crossing McCarthy had started his characters down the path of destruction, and we knew it. By the way, do not become too enchanted with Cormac's descriptions of life as a southwestern cowpuncher. His verbal paintings of the geography are fantastic, but his understanding of the people are simplistic.
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Ravishing, 10. November 1999
Von Ein Kunde
I loved this book. It haunted me for weeks after reading it. I wept at the ending. I can't imagine it as a movie, because the books are so perfect, but of course I will see it and try not to get my hopes too high that it will be anything like the books. I wonder if they will just do All The Pretty Horses? I guess Matt Damon will play the hero. In my mind, Billy Crudup would have been a better choice, or anyone slimmer, lighter, more boy-like, more serious. These novels are miraculous; they seem "channeled." I'm rarely envious of other writers, but these are books I would have been proud to write.
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Good book, 7. November 1999
Von Ein Kunde
CITIES OF THE PLAIN is a finely crafted novel, a very compelling tale which weaves a stunning plot much in the style of recent gems like "The Triumph and the Glory" or "Black Notice", or even books of a more techno-thriller bent like "The Devil's Teardrop." Four stars from me, the only weakness was a lack of effort at effective characterization.
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Engaging and entertaining, 17. September 1999
This is the most engaging and entertaining of the border trilogy. Compared to the first two novels, the characters have more life and, because they are older, their dialogue has more liveliness. The characters and the plot show great wit. Simultaneously, they evoke strong empathy. Then there is the bonus of the epilogue. In it, the author uses the metaphor of a dream to show us how he relates to his characters. It is a revealing confession of the degree/lack of control and of responsibility he feels for the characters' behavior. I really enjoyed this book.
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