Book Review: Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing (1994)

Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing (1994)

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Welcome back!

In this blog post, I will be reviewing The Crossing, one of the many masterworks written by Cormac McCarthy, who I firmly believe is an unequaled literary genius. There are other literary geniuses whose genius is unequal to his, but the simple fact is that no one writes how McCarthy wrote. He passed away June 2023.

The Crossing is the second title in McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," a series including All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain. The Crossing is also one of six books by McCarthy that I've read, and it does not fall short of the others with respect to the depth of the philosophy espoused through McCarthy by way of his characters; the stark imagery that McCarthy uses successfully as a form of world-building; and the unparalleled way in which McCarthy can conjure up tension and visceral emotion during scenes which, by right, there should be none. Any one book within the Border Trilogy can be read independently of another, but as a whole, the three installments together stand as one of the finest achievements of contemporary American literature.

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As is true of many of McCarthy's works, what sets The Crossing apart from other books in its genre (and really, are there any that compare?) is its prose, its imagery, and the philosophizing of McCarthy's characters. No other author can so seamlessly ruminate on God, isolation, time, and the nature of the world in such depth as McCarthy, because for any other author to do so would be for his or her work to fall flat, or else to simply be boring. And while I know I've already said many complimentary things about the author and the book, without rooting my praise in actual excerpts from the work, rest assured that this will be a post foregrounded by passages from The Crossing. I marked with my trusty tape flags more than seventy sections worthy of rereading, and I will dive into several below.

The Crossing sees its main character, a teenager named Billy Parham, make three separate crossings across the border into Mexico: the first, to transport a female wolf to the mountains from which Billy believes her to have come; the second, with his brother, Boyd, to recover several horses which had been stolen from his family; and the third, to recover Boyd's remains, after Boyd's stubbornness and passion, in tandem with a number of other factors which I won't get into here, lead to his untimely death. It is a tragic series of crossings, and they invariably exact some toll upon Billy.

Critics have referred to this book as a bildungsroman, and while I agree to the extent that it shares some thematic elements with classic coming-of-age tales, the trials and tribulations which Billy goes through are incomparable to the normal adolescent anxieties and trivial difficulties. This is a tragic story of adventure and reflection, and the ideas explored are those which belong properly inside of the mind of a much older man, rather than a teenager. They are McCarthy's ideas - McCarthy, who was 60 for much of the writing of this book. Yet the maturity evident in The Crossing's philosophizing serves also to reinforce the notion that Billy had to grow up quickly in this dusty, dangerous world. And with each subsequent border crossing, Billy leaves childhood and early adulthood in "the cerros and the sierras and the deserts" of the distant past.

McCarthy conceives of a world of openness, and with his airy prose, effectively brings that world to life; a world connected to nature and some collective spirit; a bloody, atavistic world, but one that also possesses a singular beauty. In several passages, the worldviews of animals are considered in relation to humanity's, as in this passage from the perspective of the she-wolf, the subject of the first border crossing: "Deer and hare and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from." (127.) It is an older world that McCarthy evokes, and even then-new technology and innovation seem dusty and antiquated: "To the south over the town[,] rockets were rising in long sputtering arcs and breaking open in the darkness and falling in a slow hot confetti." (124.) There is a languorous quality to everything in Billy's world, and even tense scenes can seem quaint; like they were dragged from the distant past to the time in which Billy's story takes place. Danger, too, has an almost anachronistic tone: "Men with torches were passing singlefile down the stable past the open door of the stall where [Billy]'d been sleeping, their figures reeling outsized across the farther walls." (112.) Shadowed figures bent on doing harm "reel" in firelight, like something carnivalesque. They belong to a time in which men lived in caves; made fire; and hunted, domesticated, and rode animals as a necessity.

Shadows, a motif present in much of McCarthy's writing, reel incessantly throughout The Crossing: "[Billy] looked back at Boyd. Thin atop the unfurnished horse. Thinner yet in shadow. The tall dark horse that trod the road with its great angular articulations arch and slanting in the dust more true of horse than horse he rode." (203.) It is an unspoken cardinal rule of writing prose in the image of Cormac McCarthy that figures do not simply move; they articulate, they reel, they whirl in the manner of some ancient beast or deity. Nor is it enough for someone or something to simply be; the shadow that thing casts has value - adds color, depth, and emotion to it in a way that McCarthy never discounts.

But shot through all of this richness of prose, there is startling depth. McCarthy weighs the immutability of the past, the persistence of time, and the specious nature of vengeance, as here: "The ganadero [livestock keeper] leaned back in the chair again. Your brother is young enough to believe that the past still exists, he said. That the injustices within it await his remedy. Perhaps you believe this also?" (202.) The simpler the lives of the characters, the greater the wisdom they have to share. "He said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim." (288.) Wisdom seemingly borne of violence or suspicion or the simple fact that the characters were reared in the exaggerated atmosphere imagined by Cormac McCarthy in his books. Everyone and everything is dark, or gaunt, or sepulchral ("Men talking in the street fell silent at his approach and spoke again when he had passed." (279.)); everyone understands a way of a world which is alien to a modern-day reader. There is little dialogue because the important things are understood and tacitly accepted by all.

I doubt very much if the world in which Billy lives ever existed. McCarthy captures the spirit of the aged Old West, builds upon the most dramatic elements thereof, and injects darkness and austerity into the result. The outcome is a particularly McCarthy-ian hellscape. As in The Road or Blood Meridian: life is dark; matters are serious; the stakes are always 'life or death.' For anyone going into this book hoping to read a faithful retelling of events in the West as they were, this is not the book for you. But for those of you who prefer to read about the Old West, corrupted and wiped clean of its levity and humor, and characterized in the most stunning prose, no one writes better than McCarthy. He was considered by many prominent critics and peers to be the torch-bearer of the American literary tradition, and his first editor was also Faulkner's editor. While this book is installment two in a three-part series, it is excellent, and I rate it nine out of ten.

Thanks for reading, and, as always, I welcome reader engagement! Please write to me at will.b.eaton.00@gmail.com to discuss this book, other books, writing, or any other subject matter you believe would be of interest to me.

(Main Image: Cover of The Crossing as published by Alfred A. Knopf.)