Cities of the Plain (The Border Trilogy, #3)

If you are here for part 3 you already know the score. Trouble along the desolate yet beautiful border region. Desolate yet beautiful writing. Intense descriptions of inane things, peppered with blistering peans on life, death, god and anything in between.

The actual story brings together the two main characters from books 1 and 2, but this book like those can be read independently - they talk so sparsley that their intense past experiences bearly come up!

This book is better and more action packed than the first, maybe not as good as the second. Like the second the best parts come in two big switches from the main narrative, the dream and the blind maistro's story. Like a 20th century Dostoyevski.

There is also a major time jump at the end, much more dramatic than the one in "Blood Meridian" yet similar as we also (possibly) have a dark, supernatural meeting. I really liked the section, but understand the reservations about it.

In typical McCarthy fashion we have some astounding writing hidden, almost thrown away in single sentences or passages that are not part of the story, it's a great skill and something that keeps me coming back for more. Look out for a beautiful passege ending with a statement on how loss and beauty are the same, all from a stemmng from a glance between the boy and an unnamed donkey driver.

Yet it also wouldn't be McCarthy without lines like this "In his time the country went from the oil lamp and horse and carrage to jets and the atomic bomb, but it wasn't that what confused him, it was that his daughter was dead." Ouch.

McCarthy was director of the Santa Fe research institute, while there he published a brilliant essay on the unconscious, on how it is part of us yet somehow different, he posits that it is older than language, yet has not learned to communicate using it - leaving us with dreams as a bridge.

You can see some of it here in fictionlsed form "Each man is the bard of his own existencie" - a stunning passage on the power of knowing, further exploring that how in dreams the narrative matters more than events, but we lose the thread, and yet in life events force themselves upon us and we weave a narrative that is us. "All knowledge is a borrowing and every fact is a debt, for each event is revealed to us only at the surrender of every alternate course".