Product Description
Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought.
In the bootheel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers — this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs thus crossing into “that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever.”
An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.
Amazon.com Review
The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy’s celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager’s decision to slip away from his family’s ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.
This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy’s trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy’s most loving–and therefore damageable–character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.
Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy’s trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.
But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. –Glen Hirshberg
booknblueslady @ 10:41 pm
It begins as an innocent story of two young brothers, Billy Parham, 16 and Boyd Parham, 14 giving food to an Indian. Billy and Boyd live on a ranch with their parents in New Mexico and are required to help with the work there. One of Billies tasks is to trap a wolf who is attacking and killing their cattle. Billy becomes intrigued by the primitive and wild creature, who seems to intelligently elude capture. He attempts to learn about the wolf by asking an old and learned man about the ways of wolves. As Billy begins to feel a kinship with the wolf he discovers it caught in one of his traps. He realizes that he cannot kill it and impulsively sets out for the Mexican border to return the wolf to where it came from. By crossing the border, Billy adventures into an nether world. It is not simply another country, but another reality.
We could easily call The Crossing a coming of age story, an adventure story, a quest or an epic poem, but it is all that and much more. As with any coming of age story, Billy Parham loss of innocence comes with a price of great consequence. Like an adventure story The Crossing is filled with action and unexpected situations. As with tales of quests as the Iliad and Gulliver’s Travels we meet strange and interesting creatures along Billy’s path. Like an epic poem The Crossing is filled with lyrical prose, both in Spanish and English.
Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American authors of the twentieth century and he proves it in once again in the Crossing the second book of his border trilogy. His prose is beautiful to read, with dialogue devoid of quotation marks and contractions missing apostrophes. He shifts from English to Spanish can be challenging to the non-Spanish reader. His scenes rich with descriptors can be stark and ruthless. The reader should be prepared to be shocked and moved.
Reading McCarthy comes with a price. After reading one of his books the reader feels changed, drained and at a loss. I, like Billy cannot retrieve my innocence. It disappeared when I went south of the border with him. As the Spanish Gypsy tells him
“We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn’t fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.”
I cannot helped but be moved by Cormac McCarthy’s work and The Crossing was perhaps the favorite, which I have read.
Peggy Vincent @ 1:19 am
Cormac McCarthy is a national treasure. The Crossing begins with a long section where the protagonist, Billy Parham, is tracking a she-wolf, setting traps which she fails to get caught in, finally catching her, then being unable to kill her. So he sets off to Mexico from his home in NM, planning to return her to the mountains where from which she surely came. Things don’t quite work out the way he’d planned.
And when he returns home, he finds his world forever changed. He and his brother, Boyd, return to Mexico to try to find his father’s stolen horses and the men who stole them. Again, things don’t quite work out as planned.
Without saying too much that would reveal the plot line, I’ll mention that Billy eventually sets out to Mexico a third time on a mission of reclamation and redemption. And yet again, all does not go according to plan.
Along the way, there are long stretches of other travelers or characters Billy meets who tell their stories: a priest, a blind man, a gypsy, among others. The overall effect is one of melancholy, and of course, having been written by such a consummate master of the art, the eloquence of the language shines through everywhere. As a side benefit, you’ll learn or re-learn quite a bit of Spanish along the way. I began by rewinding the tape and doing word for word translations from my rusty memory. By about tape #6 I became aware that I was understanding the Spanish perfectly, scarcely aware he’d shifted into it.
Spectacular book on tape.
Anonymous @ 3:17 am
I first came upon Cormac McCarthy during my AP English Test in the Spring of 1999 when I had to do a style analysis of the prose from “The Crossing” where Billy had the dream of the she-wolf and how he imagined her running free with the dears and voles and so on. Well I after the test I hated Cormac McCarthy and after receiving my test score I hated him even more. (You do not want to know my score.) But for some unknown reasons I was fascinated with his writing style. It was so beautiful and yet hollow, like a meandering river leading to nowhere. So I bought the “The Crossing.” I did not read it immediately. I read it about six months later. At first it was slow but afterward the text became hypnotic and it coerced my mind into a world of haunting beauty and wanton loneliness. It revealed loneliness in you. Is that possible? Coming to the part near the end of Part I and also to where I had to do a style analysis of I found that part to be the most beautiful and incredible moving text I have ever read because the text was rich and it made you like you were Billy and that the someplace you have been or dreamed of before you cannot revisit again. It was simple heart breaking to hear how the words describe how Billy imagined, “Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel.” The she-wolf to me then seems to be symbolic of the mankind lost or forgotten or dying in certain time and a certain place (remember what Billy thought when he tasted her blood).
After reading this desolately beautiful novel, I read “All the Pretty Houses” and then “Cities of the Plain.” However “The Crossing” is in my opinion the best in the trilogy because. . . . .I cannot say since there exist words out there that express my praise and admiration and love for “The Crossing” but that I cannot pinpoint them. The book is beauty in hollowness. “But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.”
Pam Tee @ 5:57 am
Well what can I say. More brilliant writing by a master AND for the first time I found myself laughing -a lot- while reading a McCarthy book. I know you might not believe me, but truly there are some extremely funny bits in this story. [My husband kept looking at me wondering if perhaps I had slipped the dusk jack for "The Crossing" onto another book. ]
And alas, lest you wonder, McCarthy was just leading me on. Up, up he took me. Wonderful story (expected). Humor (okay, not expected). But I was laughing and soaring and I was beginning to wonder if this book might be wildly different from the others. Certainly neither “The Road”, nor “Blood Meridian” had me cackling: those were all grim fare. But rest assured. As high as McCarthy took me, that was where he dropped me from. It was a long plummet but finally I was back on familiar territory… heart torn out… feelings wrenched and twisted.
Five Stars. “The Crossing” is a McCarthy story that should make you laugh and then cry. Simply a wonderful tale with characters to care about. Exquisite prose.
Sofree @ 8:41 am
I found all the reviews missing one essential element in this powerfully moving work. I sat in the chair and wept at the end, even the last paragraphs projecting the fate of the wolf which began Billy’s quest.
The Wolf, Billy, and the disfunctional dog in the very last page represent eloquently the disappearance from our pre-packaged and sterile society a raw emotion and freedom represented by the disappearance of the wolf from our landscape and the struggles of Billy, his brother, Boyd, and other characters in old Mexico and the Southwest of America to find traction in a society increasingly predictable and unreal. Billy’s tragic rejection of the broken dog in the last paragraphs and the morning attempt to find her are wrenching.
In this sense, I found Cormac’s adventure tale the opposite of An American Tragedy by Dreiser in its reality relative to a way of life that is essential to our American character: devotion to family, independance, persistance, and raw simple frontier intelligence. To anyone who wishes to be challenged by a poetic and emotionally moving tribute to the Southwest contribution to our National character..read this book!