Title: Heart-breaking tale of survival
Product review: Like the hero of "All the Pretty Horses," the first book in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Billy Parham is a teenager who crosses the border into Mexico, where he must struggle for survival at a primitive level. At first, he makes the crossing to release a wolf he has trapped and cannot bear to kill. Later, he returns with his brother. In the course of this novel, Billy undergoes just about every misfortune it is possible to encounter, becoming progressively more wretched until the final pages, an understated vignette with a potent, heartrending effect.McCarthy is a fine writer and story-teller, particulary in the early section concerning the wolf, but I have to remove a star because of a number of dull episodes in which Billy encounters various old Mexicans, gypsies, and soldiers who inflict their convoluted philosophies upon us.
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