While many cultures may be represented by a central iconic symbol, America, that land of multiple symbolism, has the most enduring image of all, that of the cowboy. This is all the more interesting because the cowboy is a regional rather than national figure yet denotes an entire culture. At a time when it appeared that the urbanisation of the US novel had become complete thanks to the dominance of the Big City novelists and the domestic realists, the exciting visionary Cormac McCarthy revived the mythic American West with his mesmeric fifth novel Blood Meridian (1985).
Sustained by a baroque, almost Miltonic grandeur of language, Blood Meridian is a raw, unearthly masterpiece - all the more so because its random narrative is populated only by killers and madmen. Dreamers and heroes are noticeably absent in an atmosphere of primitive chaos and blood-letting. The only hero is McCarthy's prose.
His emphasis on relentless, wayward violence changes with All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first part of McCarthy's epic Border Trilogy. Here McCarthy virtually retells the story of Blood Meridian but in a gentler, initially relaxed narrative in which the odyssey theme changes from mindless bloodbath to that most romantic of quests, a youngster pursuing his dream, running away to become a cowboy.
Its central character, John Grady Cole, is not only a romantic hero and idealist, he acts as the moral heart of the book in which right and wrong are explored with brutal clarity. Two years later came The Crossing, a saga of heartbreaking, unrelenting tragedy. It is also McCarthy's finest work to date, a monumental variation of his quest theme, an American classic surpassing London and Steinbeck. Rather than continue the story of John Grady Cole, it introduces two new characters, the Parham brothers, sixteen-year-old Billy and his dangerously clever younger sibling, Boyd.
Billy Parham is Odysseus, a man caught between cultures who comes from nowhere in particular. His life becomes a series of desperate trials, tests not only of his courage but of his morality. He is an unforgettable character. Early in that book he sets off in pursuit of a she-wolf. The description of his careful tracking of her as well as the capture and Billy's subsequent relationship with the animal is one of the most remarkable passages not only in that novel and in McCarthy's work in general but in American literature. McCarthy is a landscape artist; his lyric evocation of rugged, brutal terrain is unsurpassable as is his reverent, unsentimental celebration of the horse as patient servant and witness. Young Billy battles on behalf of the wolf and ultimately destroys her in order to preserve her dignity. The sacrificial underlies the narrative, as does a sense of honour.
When Billy returns home to discover his parents have been massacred and the family horses stolen, he sets off again for Mexico, this time accompanied by Boyd, to recover them. The Crossing is a novel of unrelenting excitement and terror and humanity. Above all, there is a powerful compassion for Billy, whose struggles have left him solitary and somehow outside his own society. For others he has become "something in off the wild mesas, something out of the past. Ragged, dirty, hungry in eye and belly. Totally unspoken for. In that outlandish figure they beheld what they envied most and what they most reviled. If their hearts went out to him it was yet true that for very small cause they might also have killed him."
There is no comfort for him. He is left lamenting his brother, his horses, a stray dog he chases away and then tries to summon back, and in the end is left weeping for himself. Few writers could hope to sustain the intense pitch of fear, and heroic despair McCarthy achieves in this long novel. It is hardly surprising, but no less disappointing, that the final part of the trilogy, Cities of the Plain (Picador, £16.99 in UK), does not match the artistic and emotional energy of the earlier books.
In this new book, set in 1952 - only three years on from All the Pretty Horses - McCarthy reintroduces John Grady Cole, now Billy Parham's friend. While Cole remains the youthful romantic of All the Pretty Horses, still heeding his dreams and desires, Parham has lost the aura of nobility which surrounded him in The Crossing and appears to have become just another knowing cowpoke old beyond his years. Also curious is the fact that friendship, a powerfully cohesive element in the two earlier novels - between John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins in All the Pretty Horses and with the Parham brothers in The Crossing - falters here. Most uncharacteristically of all, considering McCarthy's extraordinary narrative and linguistic vigour, Cities of the Plain is a muted, weary book.
McCarthy's strength lies in the quality of risk he takes and the fact that he can turn technical weaknesses into artistic strengths. He forces his operatic language to the edge of parody - one gives up counting the number of "blood red suns" Previously he could use melodrama because he could make real drama of it. That is not the case here, despite McCarthy having deliberately relaxed the emotional intensity. John Grady Cole and Billy Parham do not fail as heroes simply because they are no longer heroic; their moral grandeur has been diminished as their aspirations have been narrowed. Even the Western speech which shapes the dialogue of the earlier books is less effective and also less authentic - is stagey, in fact. Older men ponder romance and remember the women they knew, conjuring up Hollywood and its cliched Western for the first time in McCarthy's universe.
Still intent on the quest theme, he again presents John Grady Cole as a young knight in love, but with a difference. In All the Pretty Horses, his love object is the wealthy landowner's daughter. This time he has fallen in love with a young prostitute whom he wants to marry. It is not that easy. Eduardo, the brothel owner, is also obsessed with her.
Throughout the trilogy McCarthy has made inspired use of the cultural contrasts between America, the New world, and Mexico, an older, more mysterious place where ritual seems to explain life. He also uses passages of Spanish dialogue. Billy speaks both Spanish and English: caught between two cultures, he cannot find a home. This cultural ambiguity is important. Late in Cities of the Plains, as John Grady Cole faces death in the only way he could, in a dispute over love and honour, his enemy sneers at his romantic delusions: "Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one. But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed." It is as if McCarthy must kill off his young knight, while Billy, now surviving in a less lofty life, is no longer relevant.
The novel, and the trilogy, conclude in a rambling quasi-philosophical epilogue set in the future which suggests that although the books are heavy in metaphor and symbol, McCarthy is an action writer, not a philosopher. Cities of the Plain fails to confer a narrative cohesion on the two earlier works, which are in fact independent of each other. It also falls short as a work in its own right. The Border Trilogy leaves the reader confident of the genius of The Crossing in particular and also of the romantic allure of All the Pretty Horses. Perhaps the failure of this concluding volume was inevitable. Even Cormac McCarthy could not sustain such a pitch of language, narrative and drama.