Set in 1952, only three years on from All The Pretty Horses, and re-introducing young John Grady Cole, this final volume in McCarthy's Border Trilogy mysteriously - and disappointingly - falls far short of the magnificence of The Crossing, the second instalment and arguably one of the greatest American novels of the century.
Most of the weakness here is rooted in the characterisation of Billy Parham, the hero of The Crossing, in which he underwent appalling suffering yet emerged as a heroic figure, quiet and accepting. In this final book he has lost the aura of nobility and instead is just another cowpoke, cynical beyond his years. Grady Cole, however, remains a romantic, his dreams and desires intact. At times McCarthy's famously operatic language edges towards parody, and the Western dialogue is stagey and inauthentic. It was never going to be easy, not even for McCarthy, a born action writer, not a philosopher, to match the grandeur and narrative power of The Crossing. Even so, this muted finale, which concludes in a rambling, quasi-philosophical epilogue set in the future, is no more than an exhausted anti-climax. Both as an individual novel and as part of the trilogy, it fails and fails.
