Book Reviews
Young Billy Parham, in a horse stall, dreams of his father's eyes, "those eyes that seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him." Billy could as well be dreaming of McCarthy's prose and the unsparing tone of this, the second volume in the Border Trilogy. The Crossing , following the award-winning and bestselling All the Pretty Horses , is set in the American Southwest and in Mexico, and features, like its predecessor, teenage boys, their horses, a girl and the recurring spectacles of desert days and nights, awful wonders and appalling deprivations, and no small amount of roadside philosophizing. The story of Billy, his younger brother Boyd, the fates of their horses, a wolf, their parents and their dog, set against a vague and distant backdrop of the coming Second World War, throws little light upon a universe without much meaning, though it is in the nature of McCarthy characters to try to anyway. In the end, when the last dog is hanged, so to speak, what survives is the rhythm of McCarthy's open, ropey sentences circling a logic as inscrutable as an animal's or a god's. Although no mysteries are solved, and no comfort gained for these lonely characters, there is that language wrestling to earth all that it cannot know and all that it can. Readers again will be in awe of McCarthy's extraordinary prose attentions—the biblical cadences, the freshened vocabulary, the taut, vivid renderings of the struggle to live.
Publishers Weekly
Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with trapping a renegade wolf that has crossed the border from Mexico to raid his father's cattle ranch. By the time he finally succeeds, Billy has formed such a close bond with his prey that he decides to return the wolf to its home, and the two head off into the mountains. Billy returns months later to find that his parents have been murdered by horse thieves. He abducts his kid brother from a foster home, and they ride into Mexico to retrieve their property, encountering gypsies, desperadoes, and itinerant philosophers along the way. Essentially a boy's adventure story written for adults, The Crossing is thematically related to the award-winning bestseller All The Pretty Horses, but it is not a sequel. McCarthy's luminous prose style, spare as the desert landscapes it describes, is almost Beckett-like in its blend of deadpan humor and existential despair. An exceptionally vivid and rewarding novel. —Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Library Journal
Volume two of McCarthy's Border Trilogy—following the much- acclaimed National Book Award-winning All the Pretty Horses (1992)—treads familiar territory but probes deeper into the darkness of the human animal. Like its predecessor, The Crossing concerns a young American rancher living near the Mexican border in the 1930s, a time when the old West is grudgingly entering the modern world while Mexico is being torn apart by revolution. And like volume one's memorable hero, John Cole Grady, 16-year-old Billy Pawson is drawn south in a nearly mythical journey to find himself. Billy initially crosses into Mexico to take a wolf he had trapped on his New Mexico ranch back to the animal's native mountains. When he returns, he finds that his home has been plundered, and he and his 14-year-old brother set off for Mexico to find their family's stolen horses. Traveling through the lawless ruins of the post-revolutionary Mexican countryside, they encounter Gypsy wanderers, carnival actors, horse-traders, horse thieves, revolutionary soldiers, and men of various religions. All offer sage advice about the journey, and Billy's failure to heed their wisdom sometimes has horrifying results. Relentless, frequently brutal, and morbidly fatalistic, the novel expresses once again McCarthy's essentially bleak vision. Because he is one of America's foremost literary craftsmen, it is also passionate and compelling. The author convincingly elevates seemingly ordinary events into near-religious moments: "They smoked the way poor people eat which is a form of prayer." Written in McCarthy's trademark prose—clear, blunt, and often startlingly beautiful—The Crossing "tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men." Like the tales of Homer and Melville, his timeless work will resonate for ages.
Kirkus Reviews