The Border Trilogy

Lots to love in this book. Plenty of bad things too.

I might or I mightn't read more books from this guy. Reading over his bibliography, he sure has a lot of interesting pitches that makes me really curious.

The main story here, I liked. It's an adventure story that does feel like an adventure story but also has a somber, heartbreaking Tove Jansson vibe.

But just like some of her books (looking at Sun City for example) he doesn't use quotation marks nor dialogue dashes. People just say things and it's not offset in anyway That gets annoying real fast. I first heard of this guy maybe twenty years ago and how he hates quotation marks, how he replaces a lot of commas with "and" and how he likes to run sentences together also with "and". "Oh, that's interesting", I thought, "I'd like to read one of his books and see whether I'd like that style." Now I have and now I know I don't. I did enjoy the read but I would've liked it much more if it was just formatted normally.

There's also "dont", "wont" and "wouldnt" in lieu of "don't", "won't" and "wouldn't". (But thankfully we at least get "I'll" and "you're".) Worst of all, "'ve" is consistently spelled "of". "He would of written this sentence like this". Mostly that's in dialogue (and one more educated character makes sure to say 'would have') and I guess the point a lot of the characters probably would've spelt it that away themselves, but, as someone who normally hates eye dialect since it comes across as so patronizing, this is one step beyond that in the worse direction since it's not even something they're saying differently, it's just his imagination that these folks are probably the type of people who spells "'ve" like "of".

There's a lot of spots where it's just hard to understand what happens.

I'm going to get into spoilers now so just go read the book yourself if you're interested.

Early on, two guys sneak off into Mexico and I'm like "okay did they rob someone?" and they soon start kidding around about how they robbed a bank. But really, they didn't. They're just kids looking for a new life. The understated show-don't-tell story-telling (reads more like a movie script than a novel) and weird formatting makes that hard to grok at first and there are plenty more situations down the road that have the same problem. So I guess this book is a valuable experiment that proves that overly showing and never telling isn't all good. Now y'all know I ain't the sharpest tool in the proverbial, and with that comes how sometimes I have a hard time following movies that are overly visual and they never explain with words what's going on. This book has a lot of that same frustration for me.

There's also a reckless bull-in-porcelain-shop approach here, but that's a mix bag of bad and good. Guy glorifies bovine agriculture and oil rig work and that passes without comment, which sucks for a 1993 book (set in 1943). But the guy also seemingly glorifies coming in like some sorta white savior who is gonna show the Mexicans how to handle horses and he courts a girl in a way that kind of wrecks her life. In both cases the narration seems to go along at first but ends up pushing back.

The main story here is great. Like most books I've read lately I like the first part the best; here I like the first half the best. Two boys sneak off into Mexico and meet a third boy on the way and their lives get changed. There's plenty of awesome locations and characters and lots of attention to detail on bags, clothes, guns and horses. I loved horse books growing up and this one goes into more detail than many of those did. Sometimes the detail is weird and makes no sense (using trot, which is the most exhausting way to ride, when you're injured and two to a saddle? Uh okay) but most of the time there's a lot of love there. This guy loves horses and that shines through.

The setting is also great. It's 1943, World War is roaring, but it feels fully like an old west tale.

I mentioned earlier on here how I reread the 1980s kids book This Island Isn't Big Enough for the Four of Us in conjuction with this. That one has no horses but two buys go camping on their own; just like John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins here they pack Kool-Aid. And that book was the first time I ever heard of huevos rancheros which they also eat in this book. Both have that same camping out under the stars vibe with plenty of focus on bags and gear. I dunno, the books just felt like mirror universe versions of each other. That one's a light-hearted kids' comedy, this one is a bloodsoaked tale of regret and rootlessness. I'm glad I got to alternate a lighter, brighter, safer book with this because that made this hit even harder.

I'm gonna end on a pretty low grade overall but what a mix of great and bad this book has and maybe I'll revisit this grade if I read more books from McCarthy. But I'll say this. I read plenty of hard-to-grade books where I find the overall structure awful while there are a couple of absolute gems in the sand. More rarely there's the converse; the book as a whole is a gem but there are some poison pills snuck into the flaws. (For example there might be a book that's overall awesome but marred by something like a cruel rape joke or a racist comment. [Also this is one reason why I hate writing reviews now: as the zeitgeist is moving on from the all-too-brief era of sensitively executed diverse representation, I realize how I come across as a pearl-clutching relic and I get self conscious over how I still want do books that actually care.])

What we have here is rarer still. This isn't a mostly-shining gem with a few singular poison pills. It's a gem worn down into dullness by grime and filth. The structure and plot as a whole is good and it's built up masterfully off a great pitch. At one point near the end the main character retells the entire book to a couple of kids and he gets through the entire story in a third of a page and had this been a lesser book I would've said "aaargh you should've made this the entire book then" but here there's no need. It's a deserved flex because as a reader I loved all the detail and sense of getting to live through that story across a couple of hundred pages.

So that's why it is a gem on the macro level. What I hate is what I've seen others praise about McCarthy and it makes me hesitate to press send on this dumb review. People love his prose style and his dialogue and I just don't. Ear for dialogue? Maybe of the tin variety. The formatting is a suffocating wall-of-text, the clunky child-like grammar is a schlep to get through. I am hating on the exact thing that some people say is the best part.