2010/1

Cormac McCarthy: The Crossing (434p.)

McCarthy’s Southwestern period started with ‘Blood Meridian’ (1985), and continued with three more novels, grouped together in his ‘Border Trilogy’: ‘All The Pretty Horses’ (1992), which I read last year, ‘The Crossing’ (1994), and ‘Cities Of The Plain’ (1998), which I’m hoping to read sometime later this year.

Already I’m predisposed to the common theme, loners riding their horses through the mountains and deserts of the American-Mexican borderlands, but what makes McCarthy such a unique reading experience is his breathtaking prose, the long sentences with little punctuation, with which he describes the American Frontier landscapes, and the events set in them.

A random example, one sentence:

“She said that her grandmother had been widowed by the revolution and married again and was widowed again within the year and married a third time and was a third time widowed and wed no more although there were opportunities enough for her to do so as she was a great beauty and not yet twenty years of age when the last husband fell as detailed by his own uncle at Torreon with one hand over his breast in a gesture of fidelity sworn, clutching the rifleball to him like a gift, the sword and pistol he carried falling away behind him useless in the palmettos, in the sand, the riderless horse stepping about in the melee of shot and shell and the cries of men, trotting off with the stirrups flapping, coming back, wandering in silhouette with others of its kind among the bodies of the dead on that senseless plain while the dark drew down around them all about and small birds driven from their arbors in the thorns returned and flitted about and chattered and the moon rose blind and white in the east and the little jackal wolves came trotting that would eat the dead from out of their clothes.”

Because of the many violent scenes, McCarthy’s novels have been compared to Sam Peckinpah’s movies or Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings. Against the backdrop of these scenes, McCarthy often expounds what seem to be Gnostic or Christian musings:

“He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.”

McCarthy is a famous recluse. Between the publishing of his first novel in 1965 (‘The Orchard Keeper’) and 2008 (when he spoke to both Rolling Stone and Time Magazine), he agreed to precisely 1 interview, 1 in 43 years, with the NY Times in 1992, and this after much prodding by his editor (we’re talking about one of the world’s best writers here). In 2009, he sat with Oprah, and with the Wall Street Journal. What transpires in these materials is a man questioning the sanity of a society that has banned death out of the public life, a man questioning the fiber of our present-day citizens who seem to have forgotten about our violent pedigree, the naked truth, violence which has been at the surface for thousands of years, and still is. The acceptance of violence is acceptance too.

‘The Crossing’ is about teenager Billy who captures a wolf in the mountains of New Mexico, returns it to Mexico but ends up having to kill it himself, finds his parents slain upon his arrival back home, loses his brother on a second trip through Mexico, returns to the US only to find that the War (WWII) has begun, travels to Mexico a third time to retrieve his brother’s body, and eventually washes up in total despair and loneliness.

I’ve done 5 McCarthy’s now, and I’d rate ‘The Crossing’ a close second to his ‘Blood Meridian’. Followed by ‘No Country For Old Men’, ‘All The Pretty Horses’, and the lesser ‘The Road’. Just another McCarthy classic.