The Crossing

The test is subtractive, and the book gives it two answers. The spine passes it: the wolf, the murdered parents, the brother, the bones, each crossing compelled by the one before and each loss the condition of the next. The tales pass it in principle. The priest at Huisiachepic, the blind man and the gypsies are not ornament but the book’s argument, three accounts of how a life becomes a story and what the story owes the world. What holds the axis, level with the lowest of the twelve, is degree. The priest’s tale runs for many pages, and the later tales return to its themes in its own idiom, so that the third restates more than it adds. The second crossing’s round of cantinas and ranch hands, of hospitality, warning and departure, repeats a pattern the first had made, and the third part is slight. Perhaps a tenth of the book could go without the knowledge changing.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the world is prior to and larger than every story told of it, and yet a human life is lived only inside stories, told by others, always partial, and always costing something to what they take hold of. The wolf is the first case. Billy’s wish to return her to her country is a story he tells himself, and the world converts her into a spectacle and then a carcass. Boyd is the last: a boy who rode off with a girl becomes the hero of a corrido, false in every particular and true in what the people need of it. Beneath runs a harder finding, that grief and good intention earn nothing from the world, and that a person goes on regardless. Held below the top because much of this is spoken rather than shown, in the tales’ long discursive speeches, and because it is a philosophical claim more than an articulated social condition.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Height is reached often and at the extremity. The wolf’s capture and the long night watches with her; the pit at the fiesta and Billy’s shot; the burial, where the prose rises into the wolf’s world after her death, the high country of her running; the ruined church at Huisiachepic; and the close, where a light whiter than day stands in the wrong quarter and goes out, and then “the right and godmade sun” rises “for all and without distinction”. Terror, grief and transport come together, and they recur in every part but the third. The landscape writing is elevated in itself and kept level for long stretches without collapse. Held below the very top because some passages strain for the cadence, and the third part and the middle of the second run flat for many pages between the heights.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The crossing is the structure: three journeys south across a line into a country of the dead and the told, each return bringing back a loss, the last bringing back bones. That is descent and return, and it carries the plot. The wolf bears weight as animal and as archetype at once: hunted, pregnant, carried home, sacrificed in a ring before a crowd, buried by the one who killed her. Boyd carried north as bones answers the wolf carried south as a living body, and the symmetry is built into the action, not remarked on. The corrido makes the making of myth a subject: the reader watches a brother become a legend. The particular stays particular, traps, wire, horses’ feet, a church and a town with names. Held off the top because the tales sometimes name the archetype aloud where the action already carries it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The inheritance is the western and the boy’s journey, Faulkner’s long sentence and the King James cadence, Melville’s metaphysical digression, and above all McCarthy’s own All the Pretty Horses, two years before. The turn is real. This is a western that refuses the western’s satisfactions: no revenge is had, the horses are not recovered, the brother is not saved. It halts for tens of pages for the philosophical tale, keeps long dialogue in untranslated Spanish and ends on the atomic dawn. The stake was real too: after the commercial success of the first volume, a slower, darker and less rewarded book. Held a tenth below the gate because the instruments, the prose and the border, are the author’s proven ones, and the embedded tale is an ancient form; the swerve lies in their union and in what is withheld, not in a departure from the tradition as large as Blood Meridian’s.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge changes. The form is the circuit, crossing and return three times over, so that the reader learns the border as a line one crosses into loss. The tales set into the narration without frame or typographic mark are the form’s claim: Billy’s life and the tales he is told stand on one footing, and he is passing into a tale himself as the book proceeds. The untranslated Spanish enacts what the tales describe, a world that is there and not wholly given. The symmetries hold the shape: the wolf carried south and the brother carried north, the arrival of the first sentence and the dawn of the last page. Held below the top because the second and third crossings rhyme with the first more loosely than the design promises, and the third part, the shortest, is a hinge that does little but turn.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over thirty-two years. The book is read as a theodicy, as a meditation on narrative and witness, as an ecological novel of the last wolves of the borderlands, as a novel of the border and of American trespass in Mexico, and as an elegy of the atomic age, and none of these readings has closed it. Its questions stay open: who killed the parents, and whether an Indian Billy had fed was among them; whether the corrido’s Boyd is truer than the brother Billy knew; what the dog at the close is, and why Billy calls it back; whether the priest’s God is present or absent. Held below the top because thirty-two years is a short test, and because the book is read less often than Blood Meridian, so that its yield is less demonstrated, not less promised.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the American novel of its decade and the literature of the American West. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that the western could bear a metaphysical novel without abandoning its matter, horses, guns, land and the border, and that a philosophical tale could sit inside a picaresque without breaking it; with its trilogy it moved the border into the centre of literary fiction about the West. What holds the axis, level with the lowest of the twelve, is that the force is a deepening of its author’s own practice more than a reorganisation of the field, and that its effect on later writers is easier to assert than to document. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the trilogy as a whole has a wide reach, and the border novel of the last thirty years owes it something, but this book alone redirected less than its predecessor’s sales or Blood Meridian’s influence.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over thirty-two years, on what is shown. The text survives whole, as published, in print without break in the Knopf and Vintage editions. Its surface is not fixed to a production era: it is set in a past already historical when it was written, and its atomic dawn has only gained weight since. The charge is on presence. The book is read among readers of McCarthy and taught in courses on him and on the West, more narrowly than All the Pretty Horses or The Road, and it has not been filmed. What carries it to the bar of the gate, and not below it, is the continuous presence of the trilogy. Thirty-two years demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on McCarthy’s English and Spanish together, with no translation between. The command is of the long cumulative sentence joined by “and”, carrying physical work, setting a trap, shoeing a horse, dressing a wound, with exactness and without explanation; of landscape at every hour and season; and of the vernacular exchange, laconic in English and fuller in Spanish. The opening, “When they came south out of Grant County”, sets the scale of the slow arrival the book will keep. Each embedded tale is given a voice apart from the narrative’s: the priest’s argument, the blind man’s grievance, the gypsy’s sly parable. Charged: the high style overreaches in places into archaism and the repetition of its own effects; the tales’ speakers sometimes share one rhetoric, the author’s own; and the third part is written with less pressure than the rest. The Spanish is charged nothing: it is the original, and it enacts the book’s claim.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs the whole: the world goes on by its own order and gives nothing back to what is done in it, and what persists of any act is a story told by someone else. Take the two most distant elements, the she-wolf in the trap in the bootheel in the first part and the light of the Trinity test in the last pages. They obey the same law: each is a thing of the world taken hold of by men and turned to their uses, and each is witnessed by Billy, who can do nothing but see. The law holds the comic and the grave, the travelling players and the gypsies’ haggling, the small talk of ranch hands and the priest’s theodicy. Held below the top because the Spanish dialogues of the second crossing sometimes run on a looser law, local colour more than the book’s argument.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Many orders, held in one boy’s road. The natural order is the deepest the book holds: the wolf, horses, weather and mountains, given a weight rare in the novel. The family: father, mother and brother, all lost. Labour: ranch work, trapping, horse trading. History: the Mexican Revolution in the blind man’s tale, the Second World War, the bomb. The state, as the border and the draft board, and as a hacienda’s power over the poor. The sacred: the ruined church, the priest’s argument with God, the corrido as a people’s scripture. Each enters through what happens to Billy, so they are integrated, not listed. Held below the top because consciousness is kept at the surface on purpose, Billy seen and never entered; because women and the city are thin; and because the politics of Mexico enter mostly as tale.

Score: 8.6 / 10