No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The point is there ain’t no point” You might think that if you’ve seen the movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2007) you don’t need to read Cormac McCarthy’s original novel (2005). If all you care about when you read a book is the plot, you might be right, because the movie is a faithful adaptation of the story. But if you appreciate laconic wit, grim and bracing philosophy, and poetic and apocalyptic prose, you should read the novel, or better yet listen to the audiobook read by the ideal McCarthy reader, Tom Stechschulte (though Richard Poe is a great McCarthy audiobook reader, too) After Ed Tom Bell, a melancholic veteran sheriff, introduces the novel’s 1980 action, McCarthy shoves us into a bloody opening: psychopathic assassin Anton Chigur (“a true and living prophet of destruction”) brutally murders a young policeman in a small station, strangling the guy with his handcuffs, which cut the victim’s neck to the bone. Chigur is equipped with serene blue eyes like stones and an exotic weapon used for both lock blowing and skull breaking: a cattle-stunning air gun that ejects a high velocity metal bolt two inches. Vietnam sniper vet Lleywellan Moss, meanwhile, is out poaching antelope in the Texas wilderness when he happens upon a scene of carnage: three heavy-duty pickup trucks and several dead men all shot full of holes. He finds a load of drugs and leaves it. He finds a still living man who asks for water, but he has none to give. He finds a briefcase satchel that turns out to have 2.4 million dollars in unmarked 100s in it. He takes it. He drives home to his young wife and then in the middle of the night goes off to do something stupid: take water to the dying man. Thus begins a tight, page-turning, suspenseful, and unpredictable plot featuring Lleywellan’s attempts to avoid Chigur, Chigur’s attempts to find him, and Bell’s attempts to find both men—as well as to confront his having been awarded a Bronze Star during WWII and to make sense of the increasingly violent world of 1980 (which, I suppose, makes the 2005 America when McCarthy wrote the novel look even worse, for old men in any era tend to find their presents less idyllic than their pasts). McCarthy depicts the craft with which the three men do their things with a fascinated attention to detail. Needless to say, life (or fate or chance symbolized by the toss of a coin) often intervenes to mess up the best laid plans. The supporting characters consist of earnest and hapless deputies, ruthless and hapless hit men, good and hapless women (like Bell and Lleywellan’s wives Loretta and Carla Jean), and clueless and hapless victims of collateral damage. Though we surely do root for him, Moss is a less interesting main character than the lawman and the killer, though he does have some good lines, like, “I ain’t making no promises. That’s how you get hurt.” Unlike the vet and the sheriff, Chigur lacks mercy, humor, and love. He does make philosophical utterances, like “Every moment in your life is a choosing.” For his part, Bell has decency and humor and loves his wife and his deceased father. He also offers plenty of life wisdom, like “You fix what you can fix and let the rest of it go.” Being a kind man, Bell has an apt idiosyncrasy, saying “kindly” instead of “really,” as in, “That kindly surprised me,” or “Kindly in a hurry about it, too.” The novel is often funny, especially in the dialogue: “It’s a mess, ain’t it Sheriff?” “If it ain’t, it will do till a mess gets here.” The novel features McCarthy’s vivid, biblical, apocalyptic descriptions: “Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abcission of the desert plains under a sky where rain curtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant. That God lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash. He walked back to the cruiser and got in and pulled away.” I suppose some readers might be upset by the ending. It upset me. But I started appreciating it the more I thought about it: so genre jarring and unwilling to satisfy. I found No Country for Old Men to be more lurid and moralizing and less poetic and magnificent than Blood Meridian, Suttree, and The Road, but if you liked those novels you’d probably like this one too. After all, “Do the best you can do and tell the truth.” But then, “If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?” But then again, “A man would have to put his soul at hazard, and I won’t do that.” And finally, “One good thing about old age. It don’t last long.” View all my reviews
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Jefferson Peters
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