It’s been an age since I finished this book, but I haven’t been able to write a review of it yet. There are many excuses for this: I’ve been starting a business, building walls in my front garden, enjoying the summer. Beyond that I suspect this is just a difficult book (strictly: set of books) to review. It’s a big book, both in the physical sense and the metaphysical sense.
Where No Country For Old Men and The Road are terse, The Border Trilogy is sprawling and lyrical. Sentences are long, free-flowing; reminiscent of Kerouac at times in their loping narrative. The landscapes of Mexico and Texas and the desert loom large, as does the physicality of the animals and people inhabiting these empty places.
Throughout all three books, there is an elegiac sense of mourning for something lost. Each novel has loss at its core, whether of a lover, a home, a family or a means of living. And this loss is amplified by a temporal dislocation of the narrative: it is difficult to place any of the books in a particular period of time, although references to wars and some technologies serve to give vague hints. The overall sense is one of a timelessness about to come to an end. At the end of the trilogy, when Billy Parham, old and drifting, marvels at seeing the rare sight of a cup hung up by a spring for travellers to drink from, you share his sense of bewilderment at something gone without a chance to mark its passing.
But The Border Trilogy isn’t just about nostalgia for a better, or at least more certain, time. In among the dense, beautiful pages there is much more to be found. Quite apart from the arresting and off-kilter central narratives there are many small stories and vignettes sewn into the fabric of the novels. Itinerant priests muse on the nature of dedication; hobos ask deep questions about the nature of reality; circus performers tell stories of love; prison-bound gangland bosses explore the ethics of suffering. Where The Road is purposefully grey and empty, The Border Trilogy, for all its enduring love of sparse desert landscapes, is full of the horrific strangeness of life. These aren’t easy reading books, but they are books you should read.