All three volumes of The Border Trilogy are available in both eBook and audiobook format on Amazon, Overdrive, Barnes & Noble and Apple Books.
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The novels of Cormac McCarthy aren’t exactly light reading, and they’re certainly not ideal for anyone looking for simple escapism or feel-good tales of good triumphing over evil. McCarthy paints a very bleak picture of the world. His protagonists are men out of time, making their way through a nihilistic world that’s moved on in a way they themselves seem incapable of doing. Maybe the old world they cling to never existed at all, but it’s certainly out of reach now.
That said, there’s also a striking beauty to McCarthy’s prose and the way he depicts a yearning for a simpler, better world that remains forever out of reach. Nowhere is that more apparent than in his classic Border Trilogy, which comprises three of McCarthy’s absolute best works — 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, 1994’s The Crossing and 1998’s Cities of the Plain.
All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing aren’t directly connected to one another, but are linked by theme and setting. Both feature taciturn young cowboys who roam the American Southwest and the plains of Mexico in a languid coming-of-age journey. Each crossing of the border signifies another formative moment in their lives, one that inevitably leads to heartache, loss and a fatalistic realization that nothing good can last. The trilogy only becomes a cohesive story in Cities of the Plain, as the two young men, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, strike up a friendship while working on an ailing cattle ranch after World War II.
McCarthy’s prose could never be mistaken for another writer’s. It alternates between stark simplicity and detailed, poetic descriptions of places and emotions his characters are hard-pressed to voice aloud. This is why, save for 2007’s No Country for Old Men, there’s never really been a great film adaptation of a McCarthy novel. There’s too much that can only live on the page and in the hearts of these characters.
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Reading McCarthy’s work can make for a difficult adjustment. He’s not overly fond of punctuation or other basic storytelling conventions, resulting in run-on sentences that often stretch into full-blown paragraphs. Because of this, his stories often actually work best in audiobook form. The Border Trilogy really thrives in this area, with narrators like the late, great Frank Muller (All the Pretty Horses, City of the Plains) and Richard Poe (The Crossing) delivering haunting renditions of these deeply introspective tales.
One passage from All the Pretty Horses stands out as particularly resonant in 2020:
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don’t believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God — who knows all that can be known — seems powerless to change.
That speaks as well as anything to the compelling blend of fatalism and faint optimism that permeates the Border Trilogy. There’s no way of recapturing the past or altering the future, only finding some way of living in the world as it is. Food for thought.
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Source: IGN.com Binge It! Cormac McCarthy's Beautifully Desolate Border Trilogy