Rating: 
Summary: Inconclusively bum finale
Review: ("The scorching memoirs of young man-about-town Jack Saul. With his shocking dalliances with the lords and ladies of British high society, Jack's positively sinful escapades grow wilder with every chapter!" -- amazon.com synopsis of James Jennings' "Sins of the Cities of the Plain")I'd read the first two books and was anxiously awaiting the publication of this last installment in the Border Trilogy... the first thing I noticed was the odd choice of title: "Cities of the Plain" was for years and years the favorite title for English translations of Proust's "Sodom et Gomorrah" colume of "Remembrance of Things Past" -- something not likely to have passed McCarthy by (i.e., as a writer, unless I was Kathy Acker and feeling particularly postmodern, I can't imagine naming one of my novels "The Tin Drum", irregardless of the fact that "Die Blechtrommel" was the title Gunter Grass gave it in German) -- if you don't get the Biblical allusion, the title must seem fairly straightforward: cities, Great Plains, cowhands, etc. But the reference to Sodom and Gomorrah seems so utterly off: Billy Parham as Lot, and John Grady as Lot's wife, turned to a pillar of sand? El Paso as Sodom, and Juarez as Gomorrah? And so on, nothing really matching. The metaphor's too vague... Grady -- and to a lesser extent, Parham -- seem to use their dreams, their unspoken fantasies, to project the world they live in only a precarious step or two ahead of where they're already at. It rarely reflects their surroundings more than haphazardly, gets them into all sorts of trouble, and is resolved for Grady in tragedy, vengeance, and death, and for Parham in perhaps the most oblique of all the sinister Mexican parables with which McCarthy has so generously salted and peppered the whole trilogy. That projection -- that use of the world as a screen, simultaneous with the reader using the book in the same way -- which worked so well in the first two books, through the characters of Grady and Parham as boys, in many ways precisely because they were boys -- doesn't work particularly well here. They're not boys any longer, their characters don't scan as boys' characters within the situations and dialogue we find them in, and yet they don't seem to be adults. Or older. They seem less like people than spirits, old ghosts divorced too long from the tickings of flesh to be particularly reliable witnesses to the waning of their personal and historo-geographical eras. Add to this the terminally arhthymic heartbeat of the book -- the time signatures of the plot change so rapidly and patternlessly one rarely gets any sense of the passing of real time -- and you have an unwieldy, misshapen appendage of a Volume 3 which completes the trilogy with all the grace and continuity of a pair of donkey's ears protruding from a human head. I'm not saying it couldn't work just as perfectly as here it fails, in some different setting, as a book on its own, as the opener of a trilogy. And I'm not saying there's not some stunning prose here (though by this time one takes it for granted coming from McCarthy), not to mention the beautiful, odd surprise of the epilogue (marred only by the aforementioned overlong parable of the dream of the man dreaming of the sacrifical altar, etc.) -- but it remains a deeply, deeply inconsistent and flawed book, full of inexcusably rushed transitions, often paperthin characterizations, and cross-cultural interchanges diluted nearly to the point of parodies (there are Mexican voices here that ring as cliched as Uncle Remus did in "Song of the South") I've searched the texts and my mind for some pattern or reason behind the ways McCarthy chose to carry out (undermine, sabotage) this otherwise seismically-affecting trilogy's conclusion, and I must admit, if such are there, they go entirely by me. The final feeling was a let-down -- and -- and what? Is he trying to say that about human life? And yet everything else in the books would deny that, as suffuse as they are with hyperventilated observation, flora and fauna and natural wonder, third ways, and third ways' thirds ways (fourth ways), and meditations on life and death and love and solitude and the relationships between men and horses. I was left scratching my head.
Rating: 
Summary: Great end to a superb trilogy
Review: A beautiful, desolate, and poignant finish to a fine trilogy of novels. Cities of the Plain would make a wonderful stand-alone book, but I highly recommend reading all three in order. Based around two wonderful characters we meet in the earlier novels, it is a shorter and easier read than its forerunners. Compared to the lyrical grandeur of the first two novels, the description is less intricate though no less beautiful for it. For me this heightens the reader's awareness of the passage of time throughout the trilogy as the central characters grow older, and one way of life turns another. Superb.
Rating:
Summary: A Suprising, Wonderful Experience
Review: Although I am not a fan of Western frontier stories, I found this book a fantastic experience. McCarthy's writing style and attention to detail places you on the Mexican ranch, riding an Arabian stallion! The characters were dynamic and gallant.
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing Plain Here -- outstanding book
Review: As he does in his other books, McCarthy writes in layers. Here, the story is simple and pure, but the subtext is deep and heartfelt. His vivid descriptions of the western landscape and the contrasting crisp dialogue of the characters, weave effortlessly together. In this story, the reader will travel from ranches to bars and brothels, from horses to whores, from knife-fights to love-making. Now maybe you don't like westerns, and maybe McCarthy can't make you want to be a cowboy, but he will make you understand a cowboy's life, and he will lay out the simple truths that seem so basic and real when you're sitting in a saddle or sleeping under the stars. And it is these simple truths that we sometimes forget in our stressed-out world. Read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Third-best book in the trilogy
Review: CITIES OF THE PLAIN has the feeling of a third book, an add-on in many ways dissimilar from the first two books in the Border Trilogy. ALL THE PRETTY HORSES and THE CROSSING feature John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, respectively, two young bucks full of wisdom, the last cowboys on the frontier of the latter half of the twentieth century. The two meet in CITIES OF THE PLAIN, with Parham twenty years Cole's senior. They appear as the same character, really, at different stages of a cowboy's life. Cole gets mixed up with a Mexican prostitute, again giving his all for the love of a young woman. Parham, who never seemed to have much time for women, watches Cole self-destruct, much as his brother, Boyd, had in THE CROSSING. McCarthy obviously loves John Grady Cole, this wise-before-his-years teen who can beat anyone at chess and can tell a horse's worth from his gait. I love Cole, and all of McCarthy's creations, too. THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN doesn't quite work, however. In many ways, it's predictable. The book is driven by dialogue, whereas in the previous two books in the Border Trilogy dialogue was sparse, the few words all McCarthy needed to help us understand. If you're paying attention, you should be able to figure out the direction of Cole's affair long before it reaches its crescendo. I would have given this book five full stars, except that it isn't as good as the previous two, which I've given five stars, and for the strange epilogue, which I tried to read three times, then gave up and slammed the book shut. A weak, weak ending to a glorious trilogy.
Rating:
Summary: Good book
Review: CITIES OF THE PLAIN is a finely crafted novel, a very compelling tale which weaves a stunning plot much in the style of recent gems like "The Triumph and the Glory" or "Black Notice", or even books of a more techno-thriller bent like "The Devil's Teardrop." Four stars from me, the only weakness was a lack of effort at effective characterization.
Rating:
Summary: Lordy, what beautiful writing
Review: Cities of the Plain is the last of a The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy. Everyone is probably familiar with All the Pretty Horses, so if you want to know what became of John Grady Cole, read this one. It picks up a few years after he left Mexico and his first love (if you don't count horses) behind and came back to the USA, where he works as a cowboy on a big ranch in a town across the border from Juarez. This time, he has the misfortune to fall in love with a beautiful young whore, and he determines to marry her.
John Grady's friend and mentor, Billy Parham (read The Crossing to learn his equally powerful story) tries to help him out - but to tell much more of this tale would be to tell too much.
Like in the other two books, McCarthy has a loooooooong passage of philosophy spoken as almost a monologue by some wise old dude. It's good stuff, but it's okay to skim through it if you're not in the mood for about 80 pages of a pretty good speech. It really has no bearing on the story; it's just McCarthy doing his thing.
I'd advise reading these books in the proper order; there's a pathos and continuity that can't be appreciated otherwise. However, they do read as complete within themselves, so, whatever. I flat out loved each one.
Rating:
Summary: Cities of the Plain
Review: Cities of the Plain presents a challenge for any reader who mistakenly chooses to bypass the first two painstakingly accurate and eloquent tales of the American Southwest with its ever present magical realism. Perhaps McCarthy has ascended the same breathtaking pinnacles in "Big Bend" to scan the Mexican horizon or has dug his fingers in the sandy dust of the desert scrubland, all the while assimilating those same visions of his characters Billy Parham and John Grady. Through his intricate Romantic descriptions of the Southwest, I have become a believer in the lure of the 'cities of the plain'.
Rating:
Summary: Gut wrenching story of love and fate
Review: Cormac McCarthy cleaned up his larger than life prose without compromising his trademark beauty of language. The final volume of his award winning Border Trilogy is a clean, gritty tale of love and fate. The only book close to it in recent literature is Del Amor y Otros Demiones by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The love story isn't a study of love as much it is of a man's dreams, his views of life and his obsessions. All this leads to the violent climax and philosophical reckoning of its two major characters, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham who appeared respectively in the previus novels of the trilogy. Many reviews beginning to come in on Cities of the Plain have reviewed this novel as a novel unto itself. It isn't. It is the final novel of the trilogy but should be viewed as the final chapter of a masterwork. Regardless Cormac McCarthy has concluded with the best part. All the Pretty Horses was dreamy and beautiful. The Crossing was violent and existential. Now The Cities of the Plain has combined the best of his pre-Suttree novels and the best of the novels since then. McCarthy is a craftsman of prose, an artisan, and here, he is at top of his craft and art. This is a great novel. Read it. Savor it. Love it.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT book, very entertaining and moving
Review: Cormac McCarthy's wonderful ear for dialogue and sardonic humor is most evident in this book. It was a real pleasure to read, and I hated parting with the characters. (If you don't get hung up on the lack of quotation marks--as some of the other reviewers did--after the first couple of pages you'll be able to intuit who's saying what as you read the dialogue. Same thing with the Spanish phrases, if (like me) you don't read Spanish--you'll know from context all you need to know.)
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