The Crossing: Volume Two - The Border Trilogy

Cormac McCarthy

ISBN 10: 033033462X / ISBN 13: 9780330334624

Published by Picador, 1994

About this Item

First UK edition first printing hardback, 1994, with unclipped jacket. In overall very good used condition with only slight signs of age, handling and storage - dust jacket a touch rubbed; boards clean and crisp. Binding tight and appears little read. Internally clean, no annotation or inscriptions; text bright and clear throughout. Photographs available. Not an old library book.

Seller Inventory # 250058

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Crossing: Volume Two - The Border Trilogy
• Publisher: Picador
• Publication Date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 033033462X
• ISBN 13: 9780330334624
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Fiction::General

About this title

Synopsis

In the 1930s, two teenage brothers whose ranch in New Mexico was raided by bandits, cross into Mexico to search for stolen horses. The novel follows them through the revolution-torn countryside, meeting soldiers, peasants, priests and thieves, all proffering advice. By the author of All the pretty horses.

Review

The opening section of The Crossing, book two of the Border Trilogy, features perhaps the most perfectly realized storytelling of Cormac McCarthy's celebrated career. Like All the Pretty Horses, this volume opens with a teenager's decision to slip away from his family's ranch into Mexico. In this case, the boy is Billy Parham, and the catalyst for his trip is a wolf he and his father have trapped, but that Billy finds himself unwilling to shoot. His plan is to set the animal loose down south instead.

This is a McCarthy novel, not Old Yeller, and so Billy's trek inevitably becomes more ominous than sweet. It boasts some chilling meditations on the simple ferocity McCarthy sees as necessary for all creatures who aim to continue living. But Billy is McCarthy's most loving--and therefore damageable--character, and his story has its own haunted melancholy.

Billy eventually returns to his ranch. Then, finding himself and his world changed, he returns to Mexico with his younger brother, and the book begins meandering. Though full of hypnotically barren landscapes and McCarthy's trademark western-gothic imagery (like the soldier who sucks eyes from sockets), these latter stages become tedious at times, thanks partly to the female characters, who exist solely as ghosts to haunt the men.

But that opening is glorious, and the whole book finally transcends its shortcomings to achieve a grim and poignant grandeur. --Glen Hirshberg