Book Review: "The Crossing" by Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing (1994)

5 Stars out of 5

Cormac McCarthy

426 pages

(Spoiler Alert: this review contains some spoilers.)

The wolf is a being of great order and that he knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there.

“The Crossing”

Cormac McCarthy began his “Borderlands” trilogy in 1992 with “All the Pretty Horses”. Part two of the trilogy is “The Crossing”. I gave part one 5 stars out of 5, I like “The Crossing” so much, I’d like to give part two 6 stars out of 5. In “All the Pretty Horses” we met sixteen year old John Grady Cole, a young man cut loose from the home he grew up in 1947 Texas who is then free to make some choices with his life. In “The Crossing” we move over one state to New Mexico and back in time by about seven years to meet Billy Parham, also sixteen. Both of these young men will make journeys on a road that seems to be of their choosing that will take them across the border into Mexico. And as much as both books use fate as one of their impressive list of themes, there does seem to be a significant difference between John Grady Cole’s choice and that of Billy Parham: John Grady makes his own choice to make the crossing into Mexico and his future, Bill Parham seems much more drawn down that road; his journey is much more an act of fate than one of choice.

“The Crossing” is told in three parts, the second and third parts each repeating part one to some degree; but with each iteration there is a ratcheting upwards of the sense of indifferent malice from the land and some of its people that Billy must re-face each time. In Billy’s first trip and the book’s first section, McCarthy has written a story that could easily stand alone as novella. Billy is introduced to the reader along with Billy’s younger brother Boyd and their two parents. The Parham family ranches for a living in southern New Mexico; close enough to Mexico that the distant Sierra de la Madre Mountains can be seen. The Parham cattle are being preyed upon by a wolf and the Parhams must trap her (for it is indeed a “her”; a pregnant “her”) and put her down to save their cattle. It is the closing years of the Great Depression and there is little room for sympathy for the needs of the wolf or her unborn pups. As in previous McCarthy books the fact that this is the end of the Depression is a multi-faceted component to the unfolding scenes. It not only tells the reader of the financial hardships abroad in the land, but it also hearkens to a familiar McCarthy theme: the end of an era; one in this case that parallels the soon to be ending cowboy era. In any event, the Parham’s must find a way to trap the she-wolf and they quite frankly lack the means or the knowledge to do so.

The Parham’s learn of a trapper that lived alone in the mountains. Billy and his father find the lost trapper’s cabin. He’s gone along with the era of trapping, but not his medieval collection of tools. Billy will use these various traps and McCarthy will utilize his storehouse of knowledge as regards the various traps and techniques necessary to trap the wolf. It will take Billy’s ingenuity as well as the traps to capture the wolf, but once he has done so, he determines to take her back to her presumed home in Mexico. This quixotic trip is the first indication of the forces that propel Billy. He tells no one of his impending trip except a chance stranger that he meets along the way. Why would Billy feel so strongly about the wolf that he would leave his family without a word to take her on what must needs be a hopeless journey? Billy seems as much in thrall to some force, some fate drawing him southward as the wolf is to Billy. Billy has been drawn not just southward but also into one of the “doomed enterprises [that] divide lives forever into the then and the now”. He will have three such enterprises within this book.

Once Billy reaches Mexico during each of his three trips he is confronted with a vibrant mélange of people and events: circuses and gypsies, fiestas and revolutionaries, pilgrims, bandits and horsemen, rich and poor, male and female, old and young. It is this last comparison that McCarthy dwells upon repeatedly throughout the “Borderlands” trilogy: he will always use a young man just starting his journey through life filled with innocence and hope and have that young man interact with a series of old people (generally but not always, men) filled with the tears and disappointments of their years. Billy will meet on this first journey an old Mormon missionary, an aged Mexican trapper, and on a later journey a blind man with this summary of life:

“The light of the world was in men’s eyes only, for the world itself moved in eternal darkness and darkness was its true nature and true condition and that in this darkness it turned with perfect cohesion in all its parts but that was naught there to see.”

Is this intended by McCarthy to be his own bitter assessment of reality as seen through his inner old man’s eyes? Is he trying to talk to his inner younger man with his sober view of the universe? And if so, would he have his younger self be the ox in this other view of life by an Amerindian carter met by Billy:

"The ox was an animal close to God as all the world knew and that perhaps the silence and the rumination of the ox was something like the shadow of a greater silence, a deeper thought" and that in any case "the ox knew enough to work so as to keep from being killed and eaten and that was a useful thing to know."

Perhaps, McCarthy would like his inner younger man to simply accept life as it is; don’t try to explain the universe, don’t put yourself out there and expose yourself to the murderous possibilities of an indifferent world; don’t confuse your dreams of hope with the universe’s dark realities. McCarthy has further tests for Billy that will explore this concept. In Billy’s second journey into Mexico, he will take his younger brother, Boyd. A young man that Billy will assert is the better of the two brothers: smarter, harder, and wiser than Billy. Boyd will in time make his choices and they will feel like choices not some irresistible draw of fate. Billy’s choice (if indeed it was a choice) to take the wolf back to Mexico led ultimately to death, and Boyd’s choice to “flee” into Mexico will also so lead. The other consequence of Boyd’s decision will again force Billy to make a third trip into Mexico. All three trips will seem to be utterly hopeless, as if Billy were a modern Don Quixote; but drawn as Billy is to his dream or his fate, he will go into Mexico, into “that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever.” Billy will make it back and will indeed make into part three of the trilogy, but few of his various companions will do so.

Like the other two parts of McCarthy’s stunningly brilliant trilogy, the reader is feted with a “cowboy” story; there are bad men, good men of honor, lots of horses and horse knowledge. But only in a McCarthy novel is the reader treated to such a thoughtful exploration of the differences between dreams and reality, between the hopes of innocent youth and the bitter realities of the aged, and of the use of the “road” as a metaphor for growth from youth into adulthood. These three books are a kind of unique “bildungsroman” where the youth in question is not the one growing to maturity; he is instead a metaphor for man so growing. The road McCarthy wants the reader to take is presumably the one he has taken, a kind of Buddhist’s willingness to let go of our perception (our dream) of reality and to accept that the Universe has its secrets and we are little more than an ox in terms of ever understanding, let alone changing that deeper, darker reality. Yes, the world man lives in can be mean, cruel and corrupt, but it can also be the simple altruism of a shared meal with a hungry stranger. So, just let go and accept it.

This book, this trilogy is not going to be for every reader, but I think for me, it was in some ways life altering in terms of how one might look at reality. I can’t really recommend it as a cowboy yarn; it might seem to be one, but it isn’t really. This is an artful book that uses beautiful language to explore some of the root existential thoughts that plague man. McCarthy draws his conclusions in each book and reaches a cathedral of thought in the epilog of “Cities of the Plains”, the third part of the trilogy. Whether you as the reader will come to the same conclusions as McCarthy is obviously an open question; what is not, in my opinion is that this trilogy is a monumental work that combines McCarthy’s earthbound view of gritty reality with an ethereal though dark and indifferent view of the philosophy of existence.

Needless to say, I recommend it strongly.

Book Review: "Cities of the Plain" by Cormac McCarthy

Cities of the Plain (1998)

4.5 Stars out of 5

Cormac McCarthy

289 pages

(Spoiler Alert: this review contains some spoilers.)

“Every man’s death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken?

Cities of the Plain

“Cities of the Plain” is the third part of a trilogy that Cormac McCarthy began with “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992. It continues the story of John Grady Cole begun in the first book, and it joins him with Billy Parham from the second book of the series, “The Crossing” (1994). This concluding book like the first two includes a cross-border romance, plenty of untranslated Spanish and a considerable amount of philosophizing. It is a substantial change from the picaresque story line used in parts 1 and 2; this book comes much closer to a Greek tragedy in many ways. Like many of McCarthy’s books the themes in this book make much use of the concept of a border in order to explore a subject, the primary subject in “Cities of the Plain” is the border between life and death, the border between dreams and reality,  and how each of these subjects intersection with fate and free will. This is not your standard cowboy yarn.

The year is 1952 and our young cowboy protagonists from the first two books are now best friends and co-workers on a ranch near Alamogordo NM. The issue of death arrives early in the book as McCarthy’s narrative makes it clear that the ranch is failing. But not just the ranch, the whole cowboy world won’t make it too much longer. John Grady is still a master of horses though, and his skills are still a pivotal part of his persona as well as to McCarthy’s desire to explore the nature of horses and man. He will quickly explore the nature of man in a clever scene involving Billy that will help McCarthy examine a positive nature of man, of the differences between Anglo and Latin attitudes and will be part of a series of scenes that foreshadow and explain the book’s climax. In this early scene, Billy will initially drive by a group of Mexicans stranded by the side of the road with a flat tire. His conscience and his memory will quickly force Billy to stop his truck and back it up to the Mexicans where he will, despite the inconvenience to himself and his travelling companion, provide the needed assistance to get the Mexicans back on the road again. When asked by his companion as to why he did it, Billy will recall a story where the roles were reversed and he was helped by a group of Mexicans. The key point to Billy was that even though they did not know him, the Mexicans never hesitated to help Billy; they didn’t even seem to think there was any alternative but to help the stranded Billy.

Beyond the obvious point about Mexicans being more willing to help a stranger than an Anglo is (a trope that appears often in the trilogy), is the introduction of the idea of interconnectedness between men. This is a key theme to “Cities of the Plain” and it will be explored in the context of death. In a later part of the book, the flip side of this idea will occur when John Grady and Billy are using a group of tracker dogs to track down some wild dogs that had been preying on the cattle the two young men were herding. As the track dogs closed in on the prey dogs, the track dogs begin to bay. Billy is struck by how the prey dogs bay back, the prey dogs never knowing at that point in the hunt, that those they felt a kinship to (a connection to), were in fact soon to prove to be their ruin. This dog hunt is working one of McCarthy’s other favorite metaphors: the border. In this case, it is the border between friend and foe. This dog hunt does several other things steeped deeply in McCarthy’s literary worldview by drawing an example of the corruptibility of dogs and by extension to man (vs. the many times described nobility of horses). A second McCarthy theme is the wild/corrupted dogs and their death functions as an allusion to fate, one linked to a graphic depiction of violent death. The fate that one dog could end up a tracker and friend/servant to man vs. the feral dog that can only be an enemy is one lead-in to fate as a theme in this book. An even better example comes from these same ill-fated (I use the term intentionally) dogs when some pups from one of the feral dogs are found. John Grady chooses the fate of one for a life with him; a life clearly very different from the life of the pup’s now dead mother. Again, the point being the life-saving act by John Grady for that pup was a twist in the fateful journey of that young pup, one for which no decision by the pup played any role.

The idea of fate versus free-will  is also described by the narrator early in the book:

“Our waking life's desire to shape the world to our convenience invites all manner of paradox and difficulty.”

At a later occasion, John Grady is trying to understand the choices he has made and whether they were choices at all:

“He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.”

He is driven to these thoughts by a fateful trip he makes early in the book when he and Billy cross the border into Juárez Mexico in order to visit a bordello. John Grady isn’t preoccupied with the idea of whores and how they came to be whores, or why cowboys want to interact with them (that one is not that tough a question). His consternation stems from a chance sighting of a young woman working as a whore in the bordello the cowboys are visiting. Her name is Magdalena. And John Grady is falling in love with her based solely on a brief look in the bar mirror at her. It is a good example of either love at first glance or yet another example of fate; this time bringing two people to one another; there will be darker examples to come.

Magdalena is beautiful and seems to be a good soul, but she has lived a tortured life. She is in thrall to her chulo, or perhaps because they run their girls out of a building, the pimps are referred to as alcahuete. There is a minor alcahuete with the name of Tiburcio, and a grande alchuete, Eduardo. Both ooze evil and lethal threat. Sadly for Magdalena, Eduardo and Tiburcio have different plans for her than the happy ones proffered by John Grady. Sadly for John Grady, Eduardo also loves Magadalena. Magdalena’s fate no matter her wishes will become the focus of the book’s climax. Referring back to the dog hunt and the two different sets of dogs that went down such different paths in life, one can hardly think of anything else as Magdalena describes her history to John Grady or even more poignantly when late in the book, she makes her way down a Juárez street where she espies two young women her own age sidestepping a puddle on their way to church. Magdalena sees her own metaphorical puddle before her as hopes John Grady will help her sidestep it. McCarthy will lead the reader to that metaphorical puddle with very little immediate warning.

It is not just fate and the nature of man/dogs and man/horses that McCarthy writes of in “Cities of the Plain”. The title just as in “All the Pretty Horses” gives a big clue as to what McCarthy is thinking about when he wrote this book. The title is a biblical reference to Sodom and Gomorrah; two towns that lived in sin and paid the ultimate price of death. Whether McCarthy is comparing those two cities to Juárez and El Paso is, I think debatable. More to the point, I think, is the whole concept of dying and of having someone die in your place. I would draw a distinction between dying for someone and dying in place of someone when we conflate that latter concept with fate. When a soldier dies in a war defending his country, he is dying for you; to some degree he made choices leading to his death. Whereas if someone is “fated” to die, when it seems they made no decision leading to that outcome, have they died in some manner that protected you? Is death a zero sum game? If Death comes calling, must someone die? Whether the answer is “yes” or “no” in this metaphorical question game, one thing is certain, the storylines of Magdalena and John Grady seem very different in the ratio of control/fate, even if they like all men arrive at some point in time at the same ending.

McCarthy could have ended the book with the climatic interaction of Eduardo, Magdalena and John Grady, but he is Cormac McCarthy, and as such he did not. He closed with a lengthy epilog, equal to roughly 10% of the total book length. In this long coda, we find aged Billy Parham having a discussion with a Mexican that Billy at first confused with Death himself. The Mexican denies that he is Death, but I would say he is most certainly the Philosopher King. McCarthy refers to him as the Narrator, and I strongly suspect that was 100% meaningful. The Narrator will lead a baffled Billy down a long description of the Narrator dreaming of a man (the Traveler) dreaming of a group of artfully described travelers. The Narrators dream is explicitly described in terms of details about the accoutrements of the dreamed of travelers, and while this is typical McCarthy writing and it is also instructive. Such detail flies in the face of normal dreaming; it serves to raise the question of what is a dream, and more importantly what is the difference between a dream and the reality we live when we wake? These are weighty questions that the Narrator goes into in some depth. Taken by themselves they are intriguing concepts, but taken in the context of this book’s overall theme of the boundaries between life and death, the idea of dreaming of death versus the reality of dying a death takes on new meaning. This is not your standard cowboy story.

I did not find “Cities of the Plain” to be any less thought provoking than “All the Pretty Horses”. They both move through some pretty heavy philosophical terrain, even as they both tell good tales of romance and thoughtfully describe many aspects of the cowboy life. The difference for me was that I found the language describing the story to be far more lyrical in “All the Pretty Horses” than in “Cities of the Plain”. There is also more of McCarthy’s brand of cowboy humor as expressed by Lacey Rawlins in “All the Pretty Horses” than with Rawlins’ doppelganger Billy Parham in “Cities of the Plain”. I also found the opening chapters of “Cities of the Plain” more poorly paced than those in “All the Pretty Horses”. That being said, and as much as I also liked Larry McMurtry’s excellent writing of the cowboy life (most especially “Lonesome Dove”, 1985), I am far more awed by McCarthy’s descriptions of that life and the much deeper exploration of life and man that he accomplishes with “Cities of the Plain”.

Like “All the pretty Horses”, I strongly recommend “Cities of the Plain”.