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chrissych 's review for:
The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
Wow. I've read McCarthy before and so know of his amazing talents, his incomparable mastery of language, his tone at once without hope and silently hopeful. But I was not prepared for the impact of The Crossing, and I don't think I'm likely to come across anything like it again, unless another of his novels does an even better job of it.
I've noticed that the author tends to explore certain themes, many of which should maybe not speak to female readers as strongly as men; yet for whatever reason they affect me so profoundly. In this second installment of the Border Trilogy, a series loosely connected by its postwar setting in the American Southwest where it meets the Mexican border, these themes come off as more pronounced, more adult, more severe, more painfully human...
The Crossing follows the young Billy Parham, whose transition from adolescence to manhood is divided into four acts, each one terminating upon a point in his life where some great loss is suffered and some great change in spirit is affected. Only a writer as skilled as McCarthy could take a reader's heart in his hands, break it four times over, and yet have them take away from the experience some deep-seated sense of hope and absolution; some feeling of crawling out naked and crying and new into the world, not a stronger being, but perhaps one that is more aware of its world and the things that exist within it.
Through Billy Parham the reader comes to see some fundamental, natural beauty within the inevitable chaos of the universe. Through the kind and wise people he meets along his journeys, the reader learns of the nature of God and his creations-- never once does the author lean on dogma to make these points either; his characters talk of God in the more spiritual sense that speaks to anyone who has ever stopped to know a tree or a river or a horse. Ultimately, McCarthy once again shares with his audience, in prose so haunting and shrewd that it cuts to the quick and often demands pause, the darkness of the world, to be at once feared and admired. Those who make it through taking every piece to heart, though they had to be broken to do so, emerge with something more than they went in with. Putting a name to that something, however... I'll let you know when I figure that out.
I've noticed that the author tends to explore certain themes, many of which should maybe not speak to female readers as strongly as men; yet for whatever reason they affect me so profoundly. In this second installment of the Border Trilogy, a series loosely connected by its postwar setting in the American Southwest where it meets the Mexican border, these themes come off as more pronounced, more adult, more severe, more painfully human...
The Crossing follows the young Billy Parham, whose transition from adolescence to manhood is divided into four acts, each one terminating upon a point in his life where some great loss is suffered and some great change in spirit is affected. Only a writer as skilled as McCarthy could take a reader's heart in his hands, break it four times over, and yet have them take away from the experience some deep-seated sense of hope and absolution; some feeling of crawling out naked and crying and new into the world, not a stronger being, but perhaps one that is more aware of its world and the things that exist within it.
Through Billy Parham the reader comes to see some fundamental, natural beauty within the inevitable chaos of the universe. Through the kind and wise people he meets along his journeys, the reader learns of the nature of God and his creations-- never once does the author lean on dogma to make these points either; his characters talk of God in the more spiritual sense that speaks to anyone who has ever stopped to know a tree or a river or a horse. Ultimately, McCarthy once again shares with his audience, in prose so haunting and shrewd that it cuts to the quick and often demands pause, the darkness of the world, to be at once feared and admired. Those who make it through taking every piece to heart, though they had to be broken to do so, emerge with something more than they went in with. Putting a name to that something, however... I'll let you know when I figure that out.