In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, a good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the … still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph.
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Cormac McCarthy’s writing style is certainly different than the norm, but he comes across with each page like a punch. Short concise scenes lay out what happens with little reflection. That’s left to the reader and there’s a lot to process.
From what lies on the surface to deeper issues of fate and the essence of good and evil. A haunting novel.
Yesterday was Easter. Pam convinced me to spend a good part of the afternoon watching No Country for Old Men. I wasn’t hard to convince, since the Coen brothers are favorites of mine and most of the films I have watched over the last few years featured talking animals or vegetables. Our Zoe is five.
I’m going to write my take on the film while attempting to leave out any specifics that would ruin the suspense for those who haven’t yet seen it.
Now, I’m no film or literary critic. Still, I’ll argue that from my angle the only way to interpret the film is to think of it as what I’ve taken the liberty to refer to as Christian noir.
Consider, though the movie is essentially realistic, the bad guy is not human. He’s too evil and/or not well enough developed (intentionally, I believe). He is a dark spirit, or as the sheriff says, a ghost.
And consider, two sheriffs from different towns talk about the incomprehensible wickedness that has overcome at least their part of the world during the past twenty years or so (the ‘60s and ‘70s). The bad guy, in my view, is the incarnation of that wickedness. (Or in evangelical Christian terms, Satan loosed upon the world in the last days).
The sheriff, while talking about his career, explains that he used to believe God would show up by the time he reached the age he is now. But, he says, God hasn’t show up. I’m presuming the sheriff is referring to the Christian version of God, because given his appearance and what we know of his background, that seems his most likely heritage.
So, he may still be waiting for God to show or he may have given up. Then, in the final scene, he tells of a dream he had last night. The dream is a cowboy’s vision of heaven.
The message the film sends me is, not only Texas, but the whole world has proven to be no country for old men, or for any who have grasped the truth, that we haven’t the power or insight to stop the tide of evil. Our only hope, or salvation, is in God showing up and giving us a dream.
Now, years after watching the film, I read the book and find that the film did it justice, which is pretty rare.
I finally got around to reading this, three years after it was recommended to me by a pair of retired federal agents who had spent much of their careers pursuing drug runners in South Texas.
No Country for Old Men opens with Anton Chigurh, one of the most pitiless and chilling figures in modern fiction, escaping a police station after his arrest. From the ease with which he kills the deputy, it’s clear that local law enforcement in South Texas in 1980 isn’t prepared to handle such ruthlessly efficient criminals. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the only first-person narrator in the book, spends a lot of time ruminating on what kind of world would produce this new breed of criminal, and on the destructive effect of having such evil at large in society.
The next scene shows us Llewellyn Moss hunting antelope on a wide-open floodplain just north of the Mexican border. Moss is an expert shot, a Vietnam vet, and a tough outdoorsman. In pursuit of his quarry, he stumbles across the scene of a massacre: two vehicles in the middle of the desert plain, far from any road, with everyone inside shot to pieces. When Moss spots a trail of blood leading away from the scene, he tracks the wounded shooter as he would an antelope. He finds the shooter dead from his wounds some distance away, and with him, the cause of the shootout: a satchel containing over two million dollars in cash.
Moss scans the empty desert. There’s no one in sight. Why not take the money?
Now we have our set up: Moss, the good man who may have made an unwise decision, and Chigurh the pitiless killer. Both are hunters in their own way, both good with guns, and both unusually adept at survival.
Sheriff Bell happens on the scene after the fact. He finds the dead in their four-wheel drives, knows that a great deal of drugs and money are missing, and understands that one or more people escaped the scene alive. He soon surmises that local boy Moss has the money, and that a number of ruthless characters will hunt him down. He sets out to find Moss, to at least warn him that’s he’s up against some very dangerous people.
As far as crime thrillers go, No Country for Old Men is absolutely top-notch. I can’t say I’ve read every thriller out there, but this has to be among the best ever written. McCarthy’s lean prose conveys the essential details of each scene, each action, with tremendous impact. There’s not a wasted word anywhere. (The author disposes of unnecessary punctuation as well. The book includes no quotation marks, and omits most apostrophes and commas as well.) The result is a powerful experience for the reader. You’re not reading a description of a story, you’re in it, living it.
While it excels as a thriller, No Country aims much higher than even the best of the genre, providing commentary through the eyes of Sheriff Bell on the decay of American society, the spread of drugs and violence, and their toxic effect on society and civilization. Bell can see this more clearly than most because he’s older, he’s been around a long time and was raised in an orderly world very different from the one he finds himself in today.
“I think if you were Satan,” Bell muses, “and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
He picks up the thread again later, noting that drugs are simply a symptom of an illness at the core of society itself. “It’s not even a law enforcement problem. I doubt that it ever was. There’s always been narcotics. But people dont just up and decide to dope theirselves for no reason. By the millions. I dont have no answer about that. In particular I dont have no answer to take heart from.”
Anton Chigurh, whose cold logic and unflinching ruthlessness was portrayed so well in the film by Javier Bardem, represents not only the violence of the drug cartels, but the seemingly unstoppable advance of the forces of destruction that are eating away American society from the inside.
In one scene late in the book, Chigurh tells a high-level drug dealer, one of the kingpins, if he wants to continue doing business, he’ll have to do it with Chigurh.
“What happened to the old people?” asks the kingpin.
Chigurh says euphamistically, “They’ve moved on to other things. Not everyone is suited to this line of work.”
“And you? What about your enemies?”
“I have no enemies. I don’t permit such a thing.”
And that’s true. As a matter of principal, Chigurh simply kills anyone who’s interests are not in line with his own.
Sheriff Bell understands this. He understands the nature of the destructive forces he’s worked his whole life to contain. He feels they’ve grown throughout his lifetime, reaching the point where they’re impossible to contain. And they’ll continue to grow, a plague to future generations who will never know what this country once was. “Good people,” Bell says, “are easy to govern. And bad people can’t be governed at all.”
Sheriff Bell’s personal crisis is a microcosm of America’s civil and social crisis, while the riveting external story of Llewellyn Moss and Anton Chigurh acts out the battle for a nation’s soul.
In case you don’t know, the title of McCarthy’s book comes from the opening line of William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” in which an old man turns his weary back on the living world whose pleasures no longer delight him and contemplates instead the golden art of the Byzantine empire.
I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
McCarthy’s novel is the story of what, in today’s world, drives a man to this point of resignation and retreat. While the action between Moss and Chigurh are more than enough “to keep a drowsy Emporer awake,” Bell’s brooding reflections on “what is past, or passing, or to come” are the heart of the book.
If you haven’t read this one yet, put it on your list. It will stick with you.
Cormac McCarthy completed the novel “No Country for Old Men” in 2005. The author returns to the border country between Texas and Mexico, locales he had previously explored in The Border Trilogy (1992-98). This stark and powerful novel, written by one of the American masters, was published in 2006 by Vintage. The novel is an intense 310 page read, a rough ride in an old pickup truck while a huge flatland storm is building on the horizon. This book is dark, chilling, and desperately beautiful.
The Coen Brothers thought so much of this novel that they adapted it into a screenplay. The film went on to win four Oscars, and to make me an even bigger fan of Javier Bardem. But we aren’t here to talk about the movie, as much as I loved it. We are here to talk about the novel, which is even darker, more intense, and more beautiful.
Cormac McCarthy uses the fewest and most well-chosen words to say a very great deal. The author’s prose is relentless, never allowing the looming threat to dissipate. From the first pages, there is a massive storm brewing just out of sight. The reader knows it its there. When it strikes, it is swift and without warning. This is McCarthy’s approach to a classic American crime novel: Use the fewest words to convey the greatest possible danger. The lightning is ever there, crackling at the edge of the page.
The jacket notes for the novel will give a reader the basic plot. A hard but basically decent man stumbles across a massacre in the desert; a drug deal gone horribly wrong. By the time he leaves the place, he has found a bag filled with a great deal of money. The money is not his, and taking it sets of a chain of events that are both dark and violent. In this the novel follows a traditional plot line: Outsider gets money; Bad Guys come looking for it. But there is much more to this tale.
Some folks will tell you that you should never ask a question in a book review, but we are going to break that little rule. What if you make a choice that awakens the Devil to your presence? What do you do if you are suddenly the sole focus of the Devil? Not an angry, raging devil, and certainly not a demon with red skin and a pitchfork. This Devil walks amongst us, calmly leaving a trail of dead men. He tests others as as he tests himself; with an intense curiosity and callousness that treats life and death as the same. He takes great pleasure in the last moments of a dying man, holding life and death to the banality of a coin-toss. McCarthy has created a nemesis that, simply by his presence, undermines the community and the country he passes through.
When our protagonist, Llewellyn Moss, takes that bag of money, forces are set in motion. Killers are unleashed. The devil takes notice. An aging Texas County Sheriff, who is also our narrator, tries make sense of what is happening and fails. The yardstick he uses to measure good and evil is not suitable for this new menace. The moral values of the old country are not up to the task of measuring this wave of violence; values that seem to the Sheriff to have evaporated, outdated and without roots.
I can tell you, without risk of spoiler and by means of warning, that there is not a happy ending coming for most of the characters in this novel. Perhaps for the Devil, but nobody else. I would wonder why, if a reader is looking for a happy ending, they would pick up a Cormac McCarthy novel. Many years before Oprah decided she liked “The Road,” McCarthy was writing dark sagas of the American West, both past and present. His language is stark, stripped, and cuts like a well-honed knife. In “No Country for Old Men,” the author has taken his art to a higher level. Striped to their essentials, his minimalist descriptions carry powerful images. They stand out as if etched in a desert sunset. Likewise is the dialogue striped to the bone. The characters do not waste many words. The only voice of compassion, the glimmer of hope of human decency, comes from the voice of Sheriff Ed Tom when he serves as the narrator. These small passages of narration give the reader a brief pause before the next burst of thunder, the next bolt of lightning.
I highly recommend this novel, both for the quality of the story as well as the art of the writing itself. Readers who need a happy ending, or who are adverse to a dark tale: run far away. This is not your book. If you wish to explore a masterwork written in the language of loss, this novel will suit you well.
I read the book before seeing the movie. The book is definitely superior to the movie. I did have some trouble following because the author chose not to use quotation marks and other punctuation that would have helped the flow. Nevertheless, this was a very good read.
If you grew up in Texas as I did, McCarthy nails it. Anton Chigurh is a classic villain.
I’ve read this book several times now. It is the model of what a great book can be, blending the best of pulp and philosophical literary fiction. This is a smart book with a famously difficult ending. This was my entry way into the works of McCarthy, and I’ve enjoyed many of them, especially Suttree and The Road. His hardcore fans sound a bit dismissive when they describe this as his most pulpy work, but that is part of what makes it work so well.
I liked the premise of the book — what happens when you find a cache of drugs obviously tied to drug runners or a cartel — and you take it? The repercussions that follow were inevitable and tragic. I found the writing confusing at times because of the quick shift from speaker to speaker, so I had to re-read some passages. I felt for the sheriff, though. Trying to save someone who is in this predicament is heartbreaking. Anyway, it was an OK read….but I must say that my best friend absolutely loved the book, so there you go.
There is in McCarthy’s writings a kind of dark and compelling poetry that draws the reader into his shadowy imaginings of the world. Like Hemingway and the lesser known novelist Frank O’Rourke, at their best all three elevate the craft of writing to the level of true unequivocal art.
The story was difficult to follow and I did not like the author’s writing style. Won’t read any books by him again.
This is one of the best books I ever read. Much, much better than the movie. Really makes you think. Sticks with you.
Vint5age McCarthy, so very good indeed, but this may be one of those rare books which was better in the film version.
McCarthy is an acquired taste for most people but once acquired very addictive. The book is a sort of black comedy on violence and nobody does poetic violence like McCarthy! The book features The most evil villain I’ve ever read in a work of fiction ever! This book was made into an Academy award winning motion picture featuring best picture of the year and best supporting actor for Javier Bardem who played the villain Chigurh.
Terrific. Read it and audio probably 8 times. Yearly reading.
As with all of McCarthy’s books, the evocative setting and high caliber of the writing are the real stars here. His characters have the gravity and sense of single-minded purpose (especially Anton Chigurh) that distinguish all his novels. This one might be the most accessible McCarthy novel, playing out as a cat-and-mouse thriller but with interludes of contemplation as the sheriff trying to untangle the mystery of a botched drug deal–and the trail of murders it initiates–realizes that he no longer feels he can grapple with the nature of evil.
This book is on my blog’s dirty dozen list. The list includes books I have loved to death by reading them cover to cover, over and over again. My copy is a mess. Its first few pages are dog-eared and water-stained (from reading it in the bath more than once), and my youngest tore off the back cover and etched crayon on one of the pages. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I won’t throw this battered copy out because I don’t need to. It’s not a book I need to show — even though it depicts the movie poster on the cover, which I hate (cause I’m reading it, not watching it); it’s a book I need to read.
I love it for the reasons why I can’t get into Cormac McCarthy’s other books. In No Country for Old Men, Mr. McCarthy makes his brilliant writing more accessible by simply telling a good yarn. He doesn’t embellish it, go off on tangents, or take us on long metaphoric journeys describing the minutiae of any given scene. But it remains firmly in the category of a literary novel. He just strips it down to its most basic commercial core.
One of the opening scenes follows a man, Llewelyn Moss, out hunting antelope and coming across the aftermath of a colossal shoot out in the desert near the Mexican border. It is a drug deal gone bad with everyone dead around a wagon circle of trucks. Llewelyn knows from experience, being a former Vietnam vet with the attitude and confidence to prove it, that there must be at least one man standing. When he looks for the man, he finds him, and $2.4 million in a case. He pauses, his whole future resting upon a choice — or so he thinks.
Cormac McCarthy writes with a sense of inevitableness in the story’s outcomes personified by an evil apparition of a man, Anton Chigurh (the author chose the name for its opaqueness ), whose scariness is borne out by his plainness. He is a man easily forgotten if you are not in his path, but he will dominate you if you cross him. His (im)moral code is chilling. While he tells victims that their fate is not preordained and that a flip of a coin can save them, the coin toss is only an affirmation of the inevitable path we fall upon.
Cormac McCarthy populates his story with salt-of-the-earth people bearing long histories of disappointment, pain, and hard living. Unbroken, just bowed, they still hold on to what goodness and hope there is in life. Chigurh, as described, acts as the judge. A Sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, is a serious man with a World War 11 past that no one but the innocent takes seriously. He is the witness. Lewellyn, his wife, Carla Jean, and everyone else, including Carson Wells, an ex-army bounty hunter in it for the money, are the defendants. None realize they are on trial for what the country has become, but they are.
It is a powerhouse of a novel.
If you are still unsure whether you want to read this book or not, take out a coin and flip it. Don’t worry about the outcome, though, because, according to the novel, the result may already be preordained.
Films are seldom faithful to the novels from which they take their inspiration. Not so here, and hardly surprisingly: McCarthy’s gritty tale is perfection – In places, the dialogue, which is as lean as the prose that surrounds it (McCarthy avoids adverbs and adjectives like the Plague), seems to have been used almost verbatim. The film is superb, the novel incredible. Read it (or listen to it; Tom Stechschulte is a brilliant narrator). You’ll be glad you did.
This is a perfect story without a word out of place.
A nything McCarthy writes is worth reading!
Another amazing book by Mr. McCarthy. I enjoyed the movie, but enjoyed reading the story more.
This book is all about the characters. Good guy vs. Bad guy. The good guy knew better than to take the briefcase, but it was too enticing. The bad guy is evil, pure evil and is unrelenting in fulfilling his duty.
Suspenseful. Tragic. But never disappointing.