A review by bdesmond
The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
Cormac McCarthy. The man can write.
The Crossing, much to my surprise, does not pick up where the first book in The Border Trilogy leaves off. Instead we zoom backward some ten years, maybe less, and focus on a different character all together. If All the Pretty Horses was John Grady Cole's coming-of-age story, then The Crossing is Billy Parham's, and to some lesser extent his brother Boyd's. Billy lives on a small piece of land with his family in Cloverdale, New Mexico. When a shewolf begins to hunt near his family's farm, Billy is drawn into a journey that will lead him south of the border, and alter the course of he and his brother's lives forever.
I think The Crossing spoke to me in a way that All the Pretty Horses came just short of. One gets the sense—like in Blood Meridian—of a country emptied out. Something irreversibly changed by humankind that now occupies it. An old country, full of life and natural beauty, that will never be seen in quite the same way again. It's in the details. It's in his power of description. He could write a hundred pages just describing the way the plains of New Mexico look and I'd read them happily.
McCarthy is just such an interesting case. He has this dichotomy to him. His writing... His prose is both ordinary and darkly gorgeous. He is a purveyor of both harsh normalcies and the strange linguistic nether reserved for dreams. You can't have one without the other with him, and both are well represented.
What I liked so much about this one... It's a bit hard to describe. But at a certain point it stopped feeling like our protagonist had any agency within the story, and was instead going through the motions of his own destiny; reacting to fate. And that's not to say that he just stumbles around, or doesn't take action, it's just a feeling that accompanies the last quarter or so of this story. It's fascinating, and feels somehow quintessentially McCarthy. And it also, of course, then begs the question: has it only been the last quarter? Was it like this from the beginning? Has this whole damn thing been some inexorable unfolding of events that are at once caused by and outside of our hero's control? What would such a revelation mean? It has the flavor of an old fairytale. But it's a thing he does, you know. Characters like the judge, and Anton Chigurh. But this time it extends beyond a single character, and feels more nebulous. Emissaries of both life and death. Strange spirits blown in on the wind.
The Crossing, much to my surprise, does not pick up where the first book in The Border Trilogy leaves off. Instead we zoom backward some ten years, maybe less, and focus on a different character all together. If All the Pretty Horses was John Grady Cole's coming-of-age story, then The Crossing is Billy Parham's, and to some lesser extent his brother Boyd's. Billy lives on a small piece of land with his family in Cloverdale, New Mexico. When a shewolf begins to hunt near his family's farm, Billy is drawn into a journey that will lead him south of the border, and alter the course of he and his brother's lives forever.
I think The Crossing spoke to me in a way that All the Pretty Horses came just short of. One gets the sense—like in Blood Meridian—of a country emptied out. Something irreversibly changed by humankind that now occupies it. An old country, full of life and natural beauty, that will never be seen in quite the same way again. It's in the details. It's in his power of description. He could write a hundred pages just describing the way the plains of New Mexico look and I'd read them happily.
McCarthy is just such an interesting case. He has this dichotomy to him. His writing... His prose is both ordinary and darkly gorgeous. He is a purveyor of both harsh normalcies and the strange linguistic nether reserved for dreams. You can't have one without the other with him, and both are well represented.
What I liked so much about this one... It's a bit hard to describe. But at a certain point it stopped feeling like our protagonist had any agency within the story, and was instead going through the motions of his own destiny; reacting to fate. And that's not to say that he just stumbles around, or doesn't take action, it's just a feeling that accompanies the last quarter or so of this story. It's fascinating, and feels somehow quintessentially McCarthy. And it also, of course, then begs the question: has it only been the last quarter? Was it like this from the beginning? Has this whole damn thing been some inexorable unfolding of events that are at once caused by and outside of our hero's control? What would such a revelation mean? It has the flavor of an old fairytale. But it's a thing he does, you know. Characters like the judge, and Anton Chigurh. But this time it extends beyond a single character, and feels more nebulous. Emissaries of both life and death. Strange spirits blown in on the wind.