Cities of the Plain is the final book in the border trilogy, and it primarily works as a companion to All the Pretty Horses as it continues John Grady Cole’s story three years later. Cole again falls in love, this time with a Mexican prostitute named Magdelena. She becomes the holy grail and the two agree to marry and start a life together. Once Magdelana’s pimp, Eduardo, learns of Cole’s plans to buy her freedom, he sets a plan into motion to thwart it, culminating in a gothic knife battle on the flooded streets of Juarez.
The book mines similar territory as All the Pretty Horses, including fate v. free will and Romanticism v. Realism. Both use the backdrop of forbidden love and the wild west to frame these themes. And both books are excellent—full of poetic writing and intense action.
The blind maestro, who John Grady Cole asks to be his padrino, plays the part of Chigurh from No Country or the old woman in All the Pretty Horses as he tries to talk Cole out of his stubborn idealism. He tells Cole,
“Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it yet another. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in the maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life” (195).
His realism is matched by the pimp’s in the culminating knife battle and the man who addresses Billy in the epilogue. Cole’s romantic stubbornness costs him his life, and while other McCarthy works like No Country and The Road explore the shifting of old and new worlds, here he seems to explore different worlds (Mexico and the US, Billy’s world v. John Grady Cole’s, etc.). Though he does nod to the old codes in a closing description of Billy’s face: “There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world” (291). It is echoed in The Road’s closing discussion of the maps and mazes of the world.
While Cole loses his life, it’s not clear that McCarthy indicts him. In some ways he still stands for the old world values of honor and loyalty, though he is clearly more reckless in this novel than Horses. Taken together, they paint a picture of the ending of a way of life, perhaps as he did in his early Southern novels. Likewise, No Country and The Road explore a similar ending of an old way of life—that of pre-9/11 America.
A film is in pre-production slated for release in 2012.
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