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The Labyrinth on
The Other Side
Cities of the Plain
by Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
292 pp.; $24
Bu 1 the other refuses to disappear; it sub
sists, it persists, it is the hard bone on which
reason breaks its teeth
— Antonio Machado, quoted by Octavio
Paz in the epigraph to The Labyrinth of
Solitude
In the final novel of his Border Trilogy.
Cormac McCarthy brings Billy Parham
and John Grady Cole, the central
figures of The Crossing and All
the Pretty Horses, to each
other. It is 1952 and Billy
and John Grady are cow
boys on a southern
New Mexico ranch
about to be swal
lowed up by the Fort
Bliss military reser
vation to the north.
To the south is
Mexico, where the
two cowboys had
been changed from
teenagers to old men
in the course of the
nightmarish journeys
of the trilogy’s first two
books.
Billy and John Grady
talk a lot about horses, about
the fate of the ranch, abcut
women, but more about horses.
They don’t talk much about Mexico, about
what they thought they were going to find
there, w-hat they did find. or. least of all.
about what they lost there. Despite all the
tortures of body and spirit both men
endured across the
river, their thoughts
are always turning
to Mexico, away
from the postwar
America that is
devouring the vast,
wild West^hat was
little more tiian a
memory and a
dream well before
either was born.
Both know that
what waits beyond
the river is not free
dom or a fresh fron
tier, but mystery,
mockery and death.
Billy Parham, at
29, has figured out
that he has never
known what he
wanted out of
Mexico, or out of
life. At 19, John
Grady Cole still
thinks he knows what he wants, oi at least
thinks he wants: Magdalena, a young
Mexican prostitute with whom he falls in
love in a bar just over the border in Ciudad
Juarez. After locating the expensive brothel
where she lives, he sells and pawns every
thing he has for a few nights with her, then
maker a plan to rescue her from her pimp,
take her across the river and marry her.
Billy fails to dissuade John Grady from his
folly and resignedly takes his part in his
friend’s doomed undertaking.
Cities of the Plain bears most of Cormac
McCarthy’s familiar marks and signs: a
funeral procession, a knife fight, dead and
dying dogs, loving minutiae of the minds
and bodies of horses, the dry deadpan ver
nacular dialogue of which he is the master,
the oracular psychopomps of the world
over the river — a shoeshine boy. a cab-
driver and a blind musician. And, as in most
of his books, McCarthy declines to give his
women characters the depth and vividness
he bestows on the men; McCarthy’s women
come to the reader as images of male desiie
and memory. Magdalena is not much more
than the fragile mirror of John Grady’s fasci
nation: Margaret McGovern, the woman
most present in this book, has been dead
for years, alive only in the words of her
father and her husband. This is not some
writerly strategy, it is a failure; we can be
charitable and attribute it to McCarthy’s
inability to give a woman her own voice
rather than to any unwillingness to do so.
The great vessel of the cowboys’ memo
ry and desire in the Border Trilogy is not
Woman, or women or a woman,
but Mexico; and in this final
book McCarthy gathers
together all the threads he
has spun in The Crossing
and All the Pretty
Horses', Mexico as an
ancient, concrete and
labyrinthine place;
Mexico as a North
American’s dream
world of exoticism,
escape, evil, and
otherness; and, most
important, the close
Mexican apprehen
sion of these Anglo
dreams and night
mares. Magdalena’s
pimp, Eduardo, taunts
John Grady with it:
They drift down out of your lep
rous paradise seeking a thing now
extinct among them. A thing for which
perhaps they no longer even have a
name Being farmboys of course the first
place they think to look is in a whore
house
Cities of the Plain
falls just short of the
dreamlike quaUty of
the two previous
novels; its language
is plainer and more
discursive, reflecting
McCarthy’s appar
ent need to make
several points clear
to the reader. This is
not McCarthy’s best
book, but it is the
necessary capstone
connecting the two
parallel master
pieces that preced
ed it; it in no way
lessens his reputa
tion as one of the
greatest of ail
American novelists.
If he can ever write
about love as com
pletely as he has
mastered mortality, loss and longi.ig, he will
have reached as high and as deep as any
writer who ever lived.
John Ryan Seawright
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