A review by jpegben
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

4.5

He held his hands before him and looked at his palms. As if they may have been at some work not of his own doing. The past, he said, is always this argument between counterclaimants. Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once more?


Easily my favourite McCarthy novel thusfar and I've read quite a few now. The debt to Faulkner is enormous and I loved how events were framed and reframed again and how the prose is so primal and atavistic, communing with the very landscape in which the novel is set. Billy is among McCarthy's most complex and well-conceived characters. He's also deeply relatable and human. He feels far more psychologically fleshed out and nuanced than many of Cormac's protagonists and the fact the reader presented with more interiority is part of what makes The Crossing so good. 

It's typically McCarthy in the sense that the novel is deeply fatalistic and pervaded by an overwhelming sense of loss which cannot quite be fully articulated. It sticks with out after you close the book. There's the gradual, creeping realisation that the world is a cruel place, that callousness is central to nature and life and who we are, but the key is to be able to persist through severity and indifference. 

One thing I loved about this book in particular was the thematic obsession with stories, mythmaking and journeys:
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.


McCarthy, like Faulkner before him, understands that mythmaking and narrative are central to identity. We cannot sustain ourselves as a species without stories. Narratives are a compass which allow us to navigate the world around us. They're topographical charts which allow us to negotiate quintessentially human experiences like loss, grief, love, and so on. And this is why, as Faulkner perhaps best articulated, truth is often immaterial. What actually happened is reformulated, recast in history's forge and beaten into new shapes, to sustain individuals, families, even nations. The entire Border Trilogy is an odyssey into the identity of individuals, but also the mythic narratives of both Mexico and the United States. The narratives on which entire political and social orders rest. Part of what makes this book so good is that Billy's story, the stories of Boyd and his Mexican lover, are part of the grander, unfolding story of the infinitely complex relationship between the United States and Mexico.