"The Crossing"
Type of work: Novel
Author: Cormac McCarthy (1933-)
Type of plot: Contemporary fiction
Time of plot: 1938-1945
Location: New Mexico and Mexico
First published: 1994
"The Crossing" is the second novel in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. It begins in the late 1930s and ends in approximately 1945 when the United States enters World War II.
Billy Parham, 16 years old, traps a wolf that has been threatening his family's small ranch in New Mexico. Rather than kill the predator, Parham journeys across the border to return the animal to its rightful home in Mexico.
This is the first of three crossings that Parham makes in the novel. Each of his trips is motivated by an almost mythic sense of duty and Western ethic. Each of the trips into the wild mountains and villages of northern Mexico is fraught with danger.
"The Crossing" is both a coming-of-age story and road trip. Parham encounters an eclectic band of characters, travelers, truth seekers, bandits, gypsies and vaqueros along the way.
Parham is not unlike John Grady Cole, the protagonist in "All the Pretty Horses," which is the first volume of the Border Trilogy. Both Cole and Parham are examples of the archetypal Western individualist: brave, principled, laconic, resourceful and with a wry and surprising sense of humor.
The overarching theme of the novel is the end of the mythic American West and its impact of this transformation on those who had no interest in the new modern, urbanized reality.
When Parham encounters an American stranger in Mexico near the end of the novel, they share this conversation:
"This world will never be the same."
"I know. It ain't now."
The author paints a vivid picture of the epic American hero in "The Crossing," and I enjoyed following Parham's trek through time and space. The prose is rich and wonderful, in classic McCarthy style.
The ending surprised me and left me wanting more. Luckily, in the "Cities of the Plain," the final installment of the Border Trilogy, Billy Parham and John Grady Cole cross paths.
It is no wonder that McCarthy is often called the William Faulkner of the American Southwest.