posted on 15 Jan 2017

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

“Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now”

– Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

The Crossing is the second – and I’m afraid it must be said deeply flawed installment – of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which began with the immaculate All the Pretty Horses, reviewed here.

The first book is a quest; the second is haunted by catastrophe. It tells the story of Billy and Boyd Parham, brothers of sixteen and fourteen respectively when the novel opens, and is set just before and during the Second World War. It concerns three crossings from New Mexico to Mexico, each a doomed venture of a kind, set against a changing – and implicitly – worsening world in which old values and old ways of life are being eroded, swept aside.

The first ‘crossing’ involves an arduous and forlorn attempt to return a trapped, pregnant she-wolf to the Mexican mountains.  This first section of the book, around 130 pages, is its most self-contained and focused part and the best. It closes with redemption of a kind, although Billy cannot identify what that redemption consists of, nor articulate what he has learnt from the savage, diminished creature he fails to save.

In a curiously dismissive, low-key interlude we find that when Billy finally returns to the Parham ranch months later – emaciated, impoverished, like “some new breed of child horseman left in the wake of war or plague or famine” – the brothers’ parents have been murdered by horse thieves. Boyd has survived, along with the family dog, which is now mute, its throat having been cut by the attackers.

With as much as they can carry on the single horse available to them Billy and Boyd set out together for Mexico, where they believe the stolen horses have been sold. This is the second crossing and makes up the long – indeed overlong – central section of the book. It also contains the novel’s most emphatically Quixotic sequences. The emaciated riders on their bony, exhausted horse, the ravaged post-revolutionary villages, the lawlessness and cruelty of civil war, and the cryptic stories within stories recounted by half-mad travellers and itinerant peasants seem straight out of Cervantes.

Billy eventually returns alone to a US now at war (it is 1943). Boyd has disappeared in Mexico with a young girl they rescued from outlaws as they travelled. In the absence of any other purpose Billy tries to enlist but is rejected because he has a heart murmur. After a period of aimless drifting he sets out yet again and retraces his steps to Mexico, this time in search of his brother. This is the third crossing and makes up the final sections of the book. He eventually finds that Boyd has been killed – whether in a pointless brawl or in opposing counter-revolutionary mercenaries isn’t clear. He finds Boyd’s grave. He exhumes the body, wraps it in a tarpaulin and loads it across his saddle and sets out to take Boyd home. This too fails. The final pages see Billy chasing off a grotesquely crippled dog and sitting weeping alone on a deserted road as the sun rises.

In some respects, it is hard to see why a trilogy that began so grandly – so flawlessly – with All the Pretty Horses should go so wrong in its second volume. Its repetitious doomed endeavours, its circularity, its lack of forward narrative drive – none of this can be taken as accidental. It seems McCarthy intends to steep us so far in catastrophe and futility that we too will be exhausted by the time we finish the book. And believe me, I was. I have rarely read such a gruelling novel and had to really push myself to complete it. It seemed at least eighty pages too long.

Now none of this is to say that the book doesn’t have its own kind of magnificence. It contains what must be some of McCarthy’s finest prose, including moments of grotesque grand guignol that are as appalling and as majestically cruel as anything in Blood Meridian. But it also has extraordinary longeurs, and some of McCarthy’s decisions about the placing and the length of certain episodes are positively contrary.

It is a profoundly pessimistic book, and this in itself is not especially problematical. After all, the brothers are wanderers in a landscape exhausted by war and catastrophe. They travel terrain that is grand and implacable, but in which man’s place is insecure and squalid – adobe hamlets sliding back into the mud from which they were built, once-grand estancias crumbling into ruin, peasants tending the almost barren land like “soiled inmates from some ultimate Bedlam…hacking in slow and mindless rage at the earth itself”. In this it has some echoes of Beckett.

But where Beckett proceeds by stripping back and reduction – language, action, events, even the possibility of agency, all are gradually removed – McCarthy piles misery on misery, suffering on suffering. And where All the Pretty Horses seemed to achieve its aims almost effortlessly and with considerable grace, The Crossing feels congested and laboured. It is without doubt a novel of the utmost seriousness of purpose, but it offers few of the pleasures of the first part of the trilogy. The deepest mystery, however, is the degree to which this is McCarthy’s intention or his failure. I still don’t know.

 

Alun Severn

January 2017