Rating: 
Summary: Heartbreak, heartwrenching tale, emotionally draining
Review: The Crossing continues, in a way, where All the Pretty Horses leaves off, with the same premise of a young cowboy crossing into Mexico, though this time with Billy Parham at the reins instead of John Grady Cole.The title, at least on the surface, refers to Billy's crossing into Mexico, which he makes a few times with different sidekicks. The Crossing may also refer to metaphorical journeys, such as from boyhood to manhood, from tame to wild, wild to tame. I won't say anything else and ruin the story, as other reviewers are wont to do. A thoroughly engaging and gripping book. At times McCarthy has Billy meet up with strangers who opine for pages on end about the mysteries of life. These intermissions I find excessive and unnecessary to the story, and I almost didn't make it past the first one, though I'm glad I did. By the end of The Crossing your brain will be full of the book, images of horses and guns and senoritas and the Mexican countryside implanted in your head, ideas of mortality, friendship, honor, and duty stuck in your imagination for days. A few notes to the other reviewers: McCarthy has constructed the Spanish dialogue so that we can figure out what people are saying in context. All you have to do is pay attention. Also, if you aren't used to the lack of punctuation by the third page you might as well pick up the classic comics edition instead. The spare dialogue without quotations draw us into the spare, harsh scenery of New Mexico and Mexico. On to The Cities of the Plain!
Rating: 
Summary: Richest, most difficult of the trilogy
Review: This book is probably the most difficult of the three in the Border Trilogy. McCarthy pulls out all the philosophical, linguistic, and metaphysical stops in his writing here, to an extent beyond even his other famous work, "Blood Meridian". It was tough going, working through the shifting narrative voices, the textual structure (and lack thereof), the absurd and the profound -- and that's not even considering the tragic plot. McCarthy creates a hero in this book, Billy Parham, quite different from the hero in the first book of the trilogy. Billy is not the elegiac mystery that John Grady Cole, of "All the Pretty Horses", is; rather, we are plunged deep into understanding and compassion for him. He seems to be our viewpoint to the nth degree. This of course makes the things he goes through in the tragic plot of the novel, so much more incisive to a reader's mind and heart. Difficult is the word for this book -- difficult and rich.
Rating: 
Summary: A World Apart
Review: Volume two of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," draws the reader into its early pages with a tale right out of Disney - a boy's quest to save a wolf from the everyday depredations of man.
It's New Mexico ranch country in the late 1930s, although it could as easily be the late 1800s, but for the intrusions of an occasional rattling truck. Billy Parham, 16, is being admitted to adulthood by degrees of trust and responsibility.
When a she-wolf crosses from the mountains of Mexico and begins preying on the Parham calves, Billy and his younger brother, Boyd, learn the intricacies of trapping - as does the reader. The laborious boiling, cleaning and waxing of the traps to remove all human scent from them; their placement and disguise and the baiting with wolf scent, all meticulously described.
McCarthy's pace and language is Faulkneresque; mannered and measured and consciously rhythmic. At first this seems stiff and artificial. But the details of particular moments and actions and the careful attention to pacing create an atmosphere that separates the reader from the common world outside its western landscape and establishes a mood of dogged, admirable determination that is central to the book.
Billy and his father sacrifice a full two days to the preparation and setting of the traps. Point of view then switches to the wolf. Driven from her mountain home, her mate caught in a leg-hold trap, she is pregnant and dismayed by the lack of wolves in the area. When she catches the scent of wolf she heads for it directly. And as quickly sniffs out the trap. And all the rest of the traps. Each is neatly, almost contemptuously sprung when the Parhams return.
Says a neighbor, quoting the area's master trapper, "Echols one time told me that tryin to get the best of a wolf is like tryin to get the best of a kid. It aint that they're smarter. It's just that they aint got all that much else to think about."
As the likelihood of trapping the wolf recedes, Billy grows more determined. His father lets him take over and Billy spends his days tracking and studying the wolf without ever catching sight of her. And finally, inevitably, his observations pay off. Billy traps the wolf. And discovers he can't bear to kill her or turn her in for the bounty.
In a moment of heroic, foolish decision, Billy turns his back on everything his father has tried to instill in him. At the same time he adheres strictly to an upbringing that fosters faithfulness to principle.
So begins his first crossing into Mexico, to return the wolf to her mountain home. The journey is so wonderfully outlandish, so romantic, the reader is drawn into Billy's passionate, stubborn persistence. His difficulties with the wild dangerous animal seem insurmountable, but Billy contrives with ingenuity and painstaking contrivance to keep the wolf alive and himself unscathed. His meetings with people are more problematic. But Billy is not one to give up. Or to reflect on the consequences of his actions.
Billy emerges from the adventure a sobered but no less romantic figure. He has two more crossings to make, two more quests into Mexico.
The second is with his brother, Boyd, who chafes under the yoke of "younger brother," following Billy's lead, his own more reflective nature silenced under the older's authority. Theirs is a more complex adventure, its passions vivid, its goals obscure. But Billy's last quest is the most vague of all. Even its romanticism is muddied and uncertain.
It's important not to give away too much of the plot. Suspense and inevitability reveal the depths of human nature, hope and cruelty. McCarthy creates a certain mystical feel with digressions along the way - the tale of a religious hermit, a blind revolutionary, a band of Gypsies towing an old airplane. Billy and his brother meet characters of endless generosity and hard-shelled savagery and are touched by both in ways that deflect and nurture the course of their lives.
McCarthy has created a sweeping panorama of a vanished west: dusty, dangerous, lawless and indifferent. And he's forged an intimate link with an inarticulate ardent soul. Billy's life is nothing like ours, his character entirely his own, yet we identify with his flaws, his short-sightedness, his aspirations and nobility. "The Crossing" captures the heart and mind with the beauty of its prose and the breadth of its story.
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