I am hungry for sparse landscapes. These are landscapes where men, in his illusions have the power of the horizons in front of him. He is alone, like a tiger, but in his state he is king. Amidst all these landscapes, I hunger for fantastic characters, almost mystic in their own perverted wisdom. They think they know the world, but these sophists are embittered and tarnished.
I’ve been looking at the world through the eyes of Billy Parham. He is young, like Hans Castorp in the Magic Mountain, but their education is much more brutal, and the pieces of wisdom that they collect is piecemeal and misguided. But they are not truly like an empty sponge, Parham made decisions which astound me as I kept reading The Crossing.
McCarthy never really gives a direct reason why his characters do things the way they do, so their actions often come as a surprise. I have searched long and hard why Billy decided to return the pregnant wolf to Mexico and I still couldn’t pin down the reason. He had become part of the world then, that the wolf and her unborn offsprings the continuation of this world, that he needs to protect it. Or that he felt that he needed to master the wolf, that he has this dominance over the old world.
It astounds me because of its selfishness and nobility, that his action is guided by a self-determination that can be mistaken as principle. He could have easily left the wolf to the alguacil when it was taken away from him and returned home, but he was determined to see the end of the wolf and had control of the way the wolf’s story ended.
I loved these sparse landscapes, the long description of these desert vistas, the colourful characters who can show great sympathy or great cruelty. The language that flows, the dialog embedded within (McCarthy never uses apostrophes), that in the end everything becomes one. A map without names, a map for the lost made by the lost.
