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Cormac McCarthy's novels compose an extended journey. His characters travel the mountain roads and forests of east Tennessee, the city streets of Knoxville, the deserts and hills of Mexico and the Southwest. For the most part. their wanderings seem without immediate purpose, or purpose of the vaguest sort: an undefined desire to withdraw or to explore or to escape. They are descendants of Ishmael, both the biblical outcast and Melville's nomadic seagoer. I can think of no other author who so carefully charts his characters' movements from street to street or town to town-you can follow them on maps if you wish. And yet his novels usually cease their telling in the midst of journeys, still on the road, short of destination, for, in the world of McCarthy, the only true destination is death.
"He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof." This is the author' s description of a gypsy encountered by his protagonist Billy Parham in McCarthy's new novel, The Crossing, but it could apply equally well to McCarthy, who himself seems fascinated, at times even exhilarated, by the multiple manifestations of doom. In his novels, death is portrayed with astonishing variety in the constant violence men do to men. "Holme saw the blade wink in the light like a long cat's eye slant and malevolent and a dark smile erupted on the child's throat and went all broken down the front of it," reads a passage in Outer Dark(1968), and the effect causes some to throw the book to the floor. In Child of God (1973), death is amatory, a means for the necrophile-murderer Lester Ballard to "[pour] into that waxen ear everything he'd ever thought of saying to a woman. Who could say she did not hear him?" In Blood Meridian (1985), a tale of Western scalp hunters, death is all butchery and business, murder for profit in a landscape of terra damnata: "They moved among the dead harvesting the long black locks with their knives and leaving their victims rawskulled and strange in their bloody cauls....Men were wading about in the red waters hacking aimlessly at the dead and some lay coupled to the bludgeoned bodies of...