The Crossing (novel)

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The Crossing (ISBN 0-394-57475-3), published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf, is a novel by prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy. The story is the second installment of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".

[edit] Plot introduction

Like its predecessor, All the Pretty Horses, it is a coming-of-age novel set on the lands bordering the southern United States and Mexico. The plot takes place before and during the Second World War, and focuses on the life of Billy Parham, the protagonist, a teenage cowboy, his family and his younger brother Boyd. The story tells of three journeys taken from New Mexico to Mexico. It is noted for being a more melancholic novel than the first of the trilogy, without returning to the hellish bleakness of McCarthy's early novels.

[edit] Plot summary

The first sojourn details a series of hunting expeditions conducted by Billy, his father and to a lesser extent, Boyd. They are attempting to locate and trap a pregnant female wolf which has been preying on cattle in the area of the family homestead. McCarthy explores themes throughout the action such as the mystical passage on page 22 describing his father setting a trap:

Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.

When Billy finally catches the animal, he harnesses it and determines to return it to the mountains of Mexico where he believes its original home is located. Along the way Billy encounters many other travellers and inhabitants of the land who relate in a sophisticated dialogue their deepest philosophies. Take for example a Mormon who describes his vision of reality thusly:

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.

In the second border crossing, Billy and Boyd have set out to recover horses stolen from his family spread.

The third crossing features Billy alone attempting to discover the whereabouts of his brother.

The title contributes the notion that it is not just crossing a border, but at one point, the crossing of one's soul into the afterlife.