Cormac McCarthy, a Southern Gothicist writing in the same vein as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, was a virtual unknown until the 1992 publication of All the Pretty Horses, the first installment of the proposed "Border Trilogy." At that point in his literary career, he abandoned the bizarre gothic elements of his previous works in favor of a more romantic tale; romantic in the sense that it is an adventure—the substance of which legends are made. The book earned critical acclaim, won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and established McCarthy as a serious writer.
With the publication of the second volume of the trilogy, The Crossing, McCarthy once again weaves a story of epic proportions. Though the portrayal of Native American and some Mexican characters could be problematic for readers, McCarthy’s prose is a pleasure to read. He is indeed a master storyteller and a master at the use of language; furthermore, there is a greater truth to be realized in this story.
Like All the Pretty Horses, it is a "coming of age" story set in the 1940s about two young boys from the American Southwest who strike out across the Mexican border to discover adventure and themselves. The Crossing, however, is a much more sorrowful tale than its predecessor. A tale of "dark and light," it is the story of two brothers, Billy and Boyd Parham, from New Mexico. It is really Billy’s story though, for it is his journey that begins to "take upon itself the shape of a tale."
The first section of the book is in itself a satisfying story that could stand alone as a novella. It chronicles Billy’s efforts to return a trapped wolf to the Mexican mountains. The reader learns at once what an introspective person Billy is when he tells no one of his almost mystical experience observing a pack of wolves on a moonlit night.
The wolf of this story is portrayed as a creature of mythic quality, "a being of great order" that knows what humans do not: "that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there." Billy, in an effort to understand more about this mysterious animal that has captured his imagination, sets out on a quest to return the injured wolf to its native Mexico, unaware of the changes that will be wrought in his absence.
Upon his return to New Mexico, Billy learns his parents have been brutally murdered by thieves. He is reunited with his brother, and together they cross the border to recover the horses that have been stolen from their family.
Mexico represents a place of great myth and wonder in this story. And for McCarthy’s boyhood protagonists it is a rugged and brutal testing ground on the road to adulthood, a place "where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of men."
McCarthy is quite apt at describing the Mexican culture as one rich with a vivid history, as well as a people for whom these stories are told and remembered with great passion. The narrative is replete with images of fiestas and traveling circuses, encounters with outlaws and revolutionaries, and the simple hospitality of the Mexican people who help them on their journey.
Two of the more unique and insightful characters Billy encounters during his trek through Mexico are a priest and a blind man. The priest tells Billy that God doesn’t whisper, that when God speaks the "soul is forever changed, forever wrenched about in the road it was intended upon and set instead upon a road...unknown to it." The priest also explains that in the end "nothing is real save [God’s] grace."
The special insight of a blind man, whose eyes were literally sucked out of their sockets during the Mexican revolution, provides Billy with the lesson that one must always begin again: "He had found in the deepest dark of [his] loss that there also was a ground and there one must begin." These philosophical flights might seem to interrupt the narrative unnecessarily, but they are essential to the truth of the story. In the end the reader hopes that Billy has had ears to hear.
It is no mistake that Billy rides back into New Mexico on Ash Wednesday after a sad, oftentimes violent and tragic adventure. And as he ends one part of his sojourn through life, he must find the strength to begin another, as perhaps we all do. As Billy sits alone and weeps in the darkness, "after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction." By the rivers of Babylon we too sit down and weep, and we wait for the sun to rise again.
The Crossing. By Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
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