Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Extraordinary and haunting

 

This is another extraordinary and haunting book from Cormac McCarthy. It’s not as consistently brilliant as All The Pretty Horses, but it is still full of remarkable language, exceptional imagery and powerful depictions of youthful masculinity adrift.

 

There are similarities to All The Pretty Horses, as the young Billy, with and without his brother Boyd, ventures across the border from the USA into Mexico seeking various things, some tangible and some not. The plot is hard to summarise and it sprawls a bit sometimes, but it’s a story of a young man adrift in the world, unsure of whom to rely on and of what really matters. Much of the time he seems to be pursuing things or ideas of things which he thinks will bring him some peace. It is often bleak and often reflective; McCarthy never hammers any message home, but important reflections emerge strongly from his use of language and out of a fantastically evoked background. There is something completely compelling about the rhythmic, almost biblical prose whose only punctuation is full stops and question marks. There is also an almost Zen-like quality to the quietly insistent descriptions of both the minutiae and immensities of things and places giving rise to sentences like this, as Billy wakes in the night:

“He could hear the horse step in its hobbles and hear the grass rip softly in the horse’s mouth and hear it breathing or the toss of its tail and he saw afar to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers and he looked out to where the grass was running in the wind under the cold starlight as if it were the earth itself hurtling headlong and he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty.”

There are also beautifully painted contrasts between the great hospitality and generosity of the people and also the violence and lawlessness of Mexico in the time before the Second World War, the laconic language of the two American brothers and the lengthy philosophical discourse of the Mexicans, and much more besides.

I did find the first third of the book hard going at times and there are some longeurs later on, too – party because those discourses by random strangers became a bit much from time to time. However, I remained gripped and sometimes very moved and, after a suitable break to digest this one, will certainly read Cities Of The Plain, the third in the trilogy. Recommended.