media consumption

The Crossing

by Cormac McCarthy

Having finished All the Pretty Horses last weekend, I decided to plow through the second book in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. This book was just as starkly beautiful as the first, but just a shade or two darker. The first book is a coming-of-age story with a glimmer of hope waiting at the end. The second book is more of a mythic adventure with tragedy and despair lurking around every corner.

What's been nagging at me while reading these books is the sense that they seem to inhabit an entirely alien time and place, much more ancient and primal than the decades surrounding WWII in which they are set. But McCarthy, by setting these stories in the border country, is describing a way of life and of living that is dying out in the north while it refuses to die south of the border. The nostalgia of the Southwestern cowboy life in the north is betrayed by the harsh landscape and dangers that lie waiting to the south.

I've already read the third book in the trilogy, but now I'm torn between reading it again (perhaps next weekend!) and reading Blood Meridian, the book Rich recommended a while back.

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