Reviews

The Crossing: Book 2 of The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

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sheparmy's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I’ve had to sit with this one awhile and think about all the content. The entire book was like a tremendous weight bearing down on me and pushing me into the ground, but it was a wonderful experience. This book is thematically heavy on suffering and death and how it binds us together. The sparse landscapes that are described here also reflect the emptiness and sorrow of the world and the characters life. This book is tragic but one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve read. The slow pace is intentional as you are forced to meditate on the events, philosophy and lessons being given here.

platonkarataev's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

oddlyconfusing's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

dr_peeps's review against another edition

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Couldn’t read after the death of the wolf

Content Warnings

berylbird's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

“The Crossing” begins in the 1930s and ends in 1945. It is a coming-of-age epic tale in the Western genre. The second book of The Border Trilogy, it is the third McCarthy book I’ve read. It follows my reading of “All the Pretty Horses” last year. I read “The Road” in some fuzzy pre-Goodread time. “The Crossing” is divided into four parts and while the first part reminded me of McCarthy’s writing in “All the Pretty Horses,” there is a darker, more dismal side that gets even more dismal as the story proceeds. It’s not a book that I can fully take in as far as parameters, dimensions, and depth in one reading.

The prose is often poetic

...among the pale cottonwoods with their limbs like bones.”

Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who’d perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them. 

He combines the philosophic with the poetic:

 When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. 

McCarthy adroitly convinces me that Billy Parham is one of those introspective individuals who is wise beyond his years. As a reader, I understood the death knell for Billy’s youth, a tragedy that screams off the page in McCarthy’s quiet, understated prose. I lament its loss even as I understand it as a rite of passage, the necessary and harrowing transformation of a boy into a man. There are philosophical passages that arise from living in and against the land, and nature, from surviving and meeting death on all sides. I accept Billy’s philosophical predisposition. I am convinced, at times by long sequences about life on the range that his experiences have qualified him, have demanded of him that he become a cowboy philosopher. That’s not to say that all of McCarthy’s set-ups go down well. The synchronicity of Billy’s meetings with melancholic and insightful individuals is suspect, but it’s a grain of salt I can manage. Meeting these strangers with my full-on attention is however, more than I can accomplish with this first reading.

Some passages are long and meandering. I lose my place. My thoughts wander. Important things happen while I’m not paying attention. I have to go backward before I can get on track again. It’s worth it to me so that I can pick up the gems, the prose treasures, the startling insights revealed as only McCarthy can. That won’t be the case for every reader.

Billy Parham, sixteen years old and filling the role of a full-fledged cowhand for his father, and Boyd, Billy’s fourteen-year-old brother are major characters. For me, Boyd was somewhat of an unknown quality, one that I couldn’t fully understand, and perhaps that is the point. How many people do we have in our lives, even siblings, that are largely opaque to us, whose history we share, and yet, we still do not know them? We do not fully understand their motivations and desires. I was not prepared for Boyd’s actions later in the story but I never felt he was just a catalyst for Billy. Boyd was a prognosticator. One of his dreams was an ominous foretelling. In another instance, he simply knew something before he should have known it. The brothers were close. McCarthy establishes this in the first paragraph.

 He carried Boyd before him in the bow of the saddle and named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english. In the new house they slept in the room off the kitchen and he would lie awake at night and listen to his brother’s breathing in the dark and he would whisper half aloud to him as he slept his plans for them and the life they would have.” 

The she-wolf in Part 1 is also a major character. The traits of the wolf’s wildness and inscrutability blend with attributes of the landscape, especially the mysterious world of Mexico that lies across the border. I loved this part so much that if it had been the story entire, I would have been satisfied. Billy is obsessed with the wolf and wants to return her to the Sierra de la Madera to the south, where he surmises she was born. Wolves have become a rarity in New Mexico, where Billy lives on the ranch with his family. His father tells him if you come across the wolf in a trap, come and get me; if her leg is broken, shoot her. The cattle that the Parham family manages are their livelihood. The wolf is killing the calves, picking them off. Billy only recognizes the impetus to save the wolf after he captures her and incongruous as it seems, muzzles her, pulling her along on a lead behind his horse named, Bird. Or perhaps the motivation stirred when he talked to Don Arnulfo, an old sick man lying abed in his home. The woman tending to him says Arnulfo is a brujo “sorcerer.” Billy seeks advice from Arnulfo regarding trapping wolves. Arnulfo says, “El lobo es una cosa incognoscible. (The wolf is an unknowable thing).” Just as easy to know the stones, the trees, the world, he tells him. “The wolf is like the copo de nieve (snowflake)... If you catch it you lose it.” None of this deters Billy. He is set on his path and the river Fate carries him along. He disobeys his father and crosses the border with the wolf in tow. It's the first of Billy's three trips across the border in this story.

I have only scratched the surface. There’s so much more to explore, both in terms of McCarthy’s writing style and the themes of loss and the search for meaning in what often seems to be a meaningless world. Violence and uncertainty are everyday companions in this epic tale. While it won’t appeal to every reader, I enjoyed McCarthy’s prose for its beauty and overt as well as subtle meanings and for McCarthy's exploration of the human condition.

vekto's review against another edition

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3.5

I need to read it again, down the road. In a time when I can be more patient and appreciate the lingering world more than I did. The prose is still beautiful. The emptiness found in The Crossing is what made it feel so much slower than All The Pretty Horses. Section 1 is a masterpiece though.