Cities of the Plain is the final volume of the Border Trilogy set in the parts of America either side of the Mexican border. It's one of those books that you could read in isolation, but without the backstories you would be missing out on a lot of depth. It really is worth reading all three and immersing yourself in cowboy culture.
After I read the second volume I was sorry to find that young John Grady from the first book wasn't in it, and I had to get to know Billy Parham instead. This was no bad thing and now I have reached the third book I find I can read about both of them working on the same ranch. Time has moved on to the end of World War Two when John Grady is nineteen and Billy around thirty. Neither served in the war as John Grady was too young and Billy was turned down at three different recruiting stations because of a heart murmur. The ranch they are working on belongs to the very elderly Mr Johnson, who Billy has known all his life, and the two men don't imagine a life anywhere other than working with the horses and cattle. It's a physically hard life, but it's rewarding, and both men are well used to pushing on through the cold air of the mountains.
Even though he is so young, John Grady has fallen in love with a young woman that he intends to marry, but this is not a straightforward process as the girl is Mexican and works in a Mexican brothel which is also a night club. She fell into the clutches of the Club owners when she was no more than a child, and because she is beautiful and elegant, she is a valuable asset to the pimps and they do not want to let her go. She says they would kill her rather than let her escape her life, but John Grady has made up his mind, and over time he hatches a plan to bring her over the border to live with him on the ranch.
Cormac McCarthy is still peppering the text with extended passages of Spanish, and this time I had to turn to Google translate to properly understand some of it because I didn't want to miss out on any detail. He is also continuing to allow characters to have extended speeches on deep philosophical matters, and the longest of these comes in the Epilogue and takes up most of the thirty pages of that section. I found this section most confusing, and whereas I re-read some of the other monologues to fully appreciate McCarthy's thinking process, I had to re-read great chunks of this one because I was really struggling to understand where it was going. I'm still not sure I have got a real handle on it, but there we are. In fact, I didn't much care for the content of the Epilogue at all and part of me wished I'd never read it but other readers must make their own minds up.
There is no doubt that this trilogy is an important body of work and Cormac McCarthy is one of the great writers of our time. As I said last time, these books may seem like too much hard work with all the Spanish to negotiate, but the effort is worth it.
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