Demob Happy

Break for the border

9/10

Cormac McCarthy is a unique voice in American fiction. His flowing polysyndetonic prose forms a poetic vision of the American West that is almost Biblical in its rythmns. The Border Trilogy is a fable about a last generation of cowboys - John Grady Cole and Billy Parnham - drawn into Mexico on dark odysseys that belie the bloodthirsty beginnings of their own country.

It is a voyage that goes way beyond a revision of the Western genre and the re-evaluation of its good vs evil paradym, but into the heart of myth and legend itself - in particular that rooted at the heart of the American experience. Its use of parable, its sense of impending apocalypse and its strangely histrionic dialogue amount to a kind of imagined Biblical testament to the evolution of American culture. A landmark work of literature that left this reader feeling forever changed.