Cities of the Plain (1998)
4.5 Stars out of 5
Cormac McCarthy
289 pages
(Spoiler Alert: this review contains some spoilers.)
“Every man’s death is a standing
in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the
fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for
his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and
who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for
him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken?
Cities of the Plain
“Cities of the Plain” is the third part of a trilogy that
Cormac McCarthy began with “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992. It continues the story
of John Grady Cole begun in the first book, and it joins him with Billy Parham
from the second book of the series, “The Crossing” (1994). This concluding book
like the first two includes a cross-border romance, plenty of untranslated
Spanish and a considerable amount of philosophizing. It is a substantial change
from the picaresque story line used in parts 1 and 2; this book comes much
closer to a Greek tragedy in many ways. Like many of McCarthy’s books the
themes in this book make much use of the concept of a border in order to
explore a subject, the primary subject in “Cities of the Plain” is the border
between life and death, the border between dreams and reality, and how each of these subjects intersection
with fate and free will. This is not your standard cowboy yarn.
The year is 1952 and our young cowboy protagonists from the
first two books are now best friends and co-workers on a ranch near Alamogordo
NM. The issue of death arrives early in the book as McCarthy’s narrative makes
it clear that the ranch is failing. But not just the ranch, the whole cowboy world
won’t make it too much longer. John Grady is still a master of horses though,
and his skills are still a pivotal part of his persona as well as to McCarthy’s
desire to explore the nature of horses and man. He will quickly explore the nature
of man in a clever scene involving Billy that will help McCarthy examine a
positive nature of man, of the differences between Anglo and Latin attitudes
and will be part of a series of scenes that foreshadow and explain the book’s
climax. In this early scene, Billy will initially drive by a group of Mexicans
stranded by the side of the road with a flat tire. His conscience and his
memory will quickly force Billy to stop his truck and back it up to the
Mexicans where he will, despite the inconvenience to himself and his travelling
companion, provide the needed assistance to get the Mexicans back on the road
again. When asked by his companion as to why he did it, Billy will recall a
story where the roles were reversed and he was helped by a group of Mexicans.
The key point to Billy was that even though they did not know him, the Mexicans
never hesitated to help Billy; they didn’t even seem to think there was any
alternative but to help the stranded Billy.
Beyond the obvious point about Mexicans being more willing
to help a stranger than an Anglo is (a trope that appears often in the trilogy),
is the introduction of the idea of interconnectedness between men. This is a
key theme to “Cities of the Plain” and it will be explored in the context of
death. In a later part of the book, the flip side of this idea will occur when
John Grady and Billy are using a group of tracker dogs to track down some wild
dogs that had been preying on the cattle the two young men were herding. As the
track dogs closed in on the prey dogs, the track dogs begin to bay. Billy is
struck by how the prey dogs bay back, the prey dogs never knowing at that point
in the hunt, that those they felt a kinship to (a connection to), were in fact
soon to prove to be their ruin. This dog hunt is working one of McCarthy’s
other favorite metaphors: the border. In this case, it is the border between
friend and foe. This dog hunt does several other things steeped deeply in
McCarthy’s literary worldview by drawing an example of the corruptibility of
dogs and by extension to man (vs. the many times described nobility of horses).
A second McCarthy theme is the wild/corrupted dogs and their death functions as
an allusion to fate, one linked to a graphic depiction of violent death. The
fate that one dog could end up a tracker and friend/servant to man vs. the
feral dog that can only be an enemy is one lead-in to fate as a theme in this
book. An even better example comes from these same ill-fated (I use the term
intentionally) dogs when some pups from one of the feral dogs are found. John Grady
chooses the fate of one for a life with him; a life clearly very different from
the life of the pup’s now dead mother. Again, the point being the life-saving
act by John Grady for that pup was a twist in the fateful journey of that young
pup, one for which no decision by the pup played any role.
The idea of fate versus free-will is also described by the narrator early in the
book:
“Our waking life's desire to
shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and
difficulty.”
At a later occasion, John Grady
is trying to understand the choices he has made and whether they were choices
at all:
“He sat a long time and he
thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he
wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”
He is driven to these thoughts
by a fateful trip he makes early in the book when he and Billy cross the border
into Juárez Mexico in order to visit a bordello. John Grady isn’t preoccupied
with the idea of whores and how they came to be whores, or why cowboys want to
interact with them (that one is not that tough a question). His consternation
stems from a chance sighting of a young woman working as a whore in the bordello
the cowboys are visiting. Her name is Magdalena. And John Grady is falling in
love with her based solely on a brief look in the bar mirror at her. It is a
good example of either love at first glance or yet another example of fate;
this time bringing two people to one another; there will be darker examples to
come.
Magdalena is beautiful and seems
to be a good soul, but she has lived a tortured life. She is in thrall to her
chulo, or perhaps because they run their girls out of a building, the pimps are
referred to as alcahuete. There is a minor alcahuete with the name of Tiburcio,
and a grande alchuete, Eduardo. Both ooze evil and lethal threat. Sadly for
Magdalena, Eduardo and Tiburcio have different plans for her than the happy
ones proffered by John Grady. Sadly for John Grady, Eduardo also loves
Magadalena. Magdalena’s fate no matter her wishes will become the focus of the
book’s climax. Referring back to the dog hunt and the two different sets of
dogs that went down such different paths in life, one can hardly think of
anything else as Magdalena describes her history to John Grady or even more poignantly
when late in the book, she makes her way down a Juárez street where she espies
two young women her own age sidestepping a puddle on their way to church.
Magdalena sees her own metaphorical puddle before her as hopes John Grady will
help her sidestep it. McCarthy will lead the reader to that metaphorical puddle
with very little immediate warning.
It is not just fate and the
nature of man/dogs and man/horses that McCarthy writes of in “Cities of the
Plain”. The title just as in “All the Pretty Horses” gives a big clue as to
what McCarthy is thinking about when he wrote this book. The title is a
biblical reference to Sodom and Gomorrah; two towns that lived in sin and paid
the ultimate price of death. Whether McCarthy is comparing those two cities to Juárez
and El Paso is, I think debatable. More to the point, I think, is the whole concept
of dying and of having someone die in your place. I would draw a distinction
between dying for someone and dying in place of someone when we conflate that latter
concept with fate. When a soldier dies in a war defending his country, he is
dying for you; to some degree he made choices leading to his death. Whereas if
someone is “fated” to die, when it seems they made no decision leading to that
outcome, have they died in some manner that protected you? Is death a zero sum
game? If Death comes calling, must someone
die? Whether the answer is “yes” or “no” in this metaphorical question game,
one thing is certain, the storylines of Magdalena and John Grady seem very
different in the ratio of control/fate, even if they like all men arrive at
some point in time at the same ending.
McCarthy could have ended the
book with the climatic interaction of Eduardo, Magdalena and John Grady, but he
is Cormac McCarthy, and as such he did not. He closed with a lengthy epilog,
equal to roughly 10% of the total book length. In this long coda, we find aged Billy
Parham having a discussion with a Mexican that Billy at first confused with
Death himself. The Mexican denies that he is Death, but I would say he is most
certainly the Philosopher King. McCarthy refers to him as the Narrator, and I
strongly suspect that was 100% meaningful. The Narrator will lead a baffled
Billy down a long description of the Narrator dreaming of a man (the Traveler)
dreaming of a group of artfully described travelers. The Narrators dream is
explicitly described in terms of details about the accoutrements of the dreamed
of travelers, and while this is typical McCarthy writing and it is also
instructive. Such detail flies in the face of normal dreaming; it serves to
raise the question of what is a dream, and more importantly what is the
difference between a dream and the reality we live when we wake? These are
weighty questions that the Narrator goes into in some depth. Taken by themselves
they are intriguing concepts, but taken in the context of this book’s overall
theme of the boundaries between life and death, the idea of dreaming of death
versus the reality of dying a death takes on new meaning. This is not your
standard cowboy story.
I did not find “Cities of the
Plain” to be any less thought provoking than “All the Pretty Horses”. They both
move through some pretty heavy philosophical terrain, even as they both tell good
tales of romance and thoughtfully describe many aspects of the cowboy life. The
difference for me was that I found the language describing the story to be far
more lyrical in “All the Pretty Horses” than in “Cities of the Plain”. There is
also more of McCarthy’s brand of cowboy humor as expressed by Lacey Rawlins in “All
the Pretty Horses” than with Rawlins’ doppelganger Billy Parham in “Cities of
the Plain”. I also found the opening chapters of “Cities of the Plain” more
poorly paced than those in “All the Pretty Horses”. That being said, and as
much as I also liked Larry McMurtry’s excellent writing of the cowboy life
(most especially “Lonesome Dove”, 1985), I am far more awed by McCarthy’s
descriptions of that life and the much deeper exploration of life and man that
he accomplishes with “Cities of the Plain”.
Like “All the pretty Horses”, I
strongly recommend “Cities of the Plain”.
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