No Country for Old Men

The best books are the ones I read slowly.

When the plot is great, like Silence of the Lambs for example, I'm turning pages, flipping and flipping more and more quickly to get to the end, to see what happens, to figure it out—the writing is merely the conveyance for the plot. But when the writing is good, and I mean really good, I read at a snail's pace. It's like a meal: I want to savour every bit. I read McCarthy especially slowly because he's an absolute master of his craft—his words are wrought so deliberately, they're like a fine wooden box with a beautiful inlaid design on the lid, all different grains and colours but fitted together seamlessly.

Whenever I finish something Cormac McCarthy has written, I feel like I need to show more smoke a cigarette and go stare out at the desert plains at dusk. People can wax poetic about their Dickens and their Shakespeare and whatever post-postmodern litfic author is the most popular today, but this, to me, is literature. This is what great literature should feel like. And yes it's spare, yes it's laconic, sometimes the prose is so barren it lacks even punctuation, but it's fucking fantastic.

It's hard for me to explain just why, too. The best I can manage is that so much is left to the imagination—you'd be hard-pressed to find an adverb anywhere. The characters are seldom described, and even then, it's only ever parts of them: Chigurh's eyes, the scar on Llewelyn’s arm. The author only ever gives you the words that are absolutely necessary, and it seems like they couldn't possibly be enough, yet somehow they always are.

I won't waste time talking about things like plot or style; they're remarkable, but in the light of this incredible novel, they're practically trivialities. You get the sense that unlike most other authors, McCarthy doesn't care much about you as a reader. He certainly doesn't aim to please or titillate you—he's here to say something, something important. About good and evil, and temptation, and flaws, and the midnight wind that whistles over the ghost-dark Texas plains, and the inescapability of fate incarnated into a silent man with an air tank and eyes like wet lapis. There's something epic about this story, dare I say it's almost biblical, with seemingly omnipotent wrath and capability seldom seen outside the Old Testament. But unlike the Good Book, there is no church built around the concepts explored here. There is only dust and blood and the distant sound of screaming, so faint and terrible it might just be the wind. show less

Outstanding. There are some differences between the book and the movie that make the book even more enjoyable. The faster pace kept me riveted over the three days that it took me to read the book which, in hindsight, is a bit of a surprise to me because I started the first several pages but nothing caught fire. Perhaps I just need to finish one book before I could get my head wrapped around this.

I liked Sheriff Bell's introductions to each chapter and this story within a story that sort of narrated the plot from an external point of view. He ends up being a more interesting character than he was in the movie and you get a better sense that all along, he is just behind the scenes, really just playing catch-up.

One couldn't help but root show more for Moss after he left the Mexican hospital, trying to get back to his wife and helping the hitchhiker along the way. His death, however, is shocking to the reader because you start to get a sense that things are going to somehow turn around. It really drives home the point that life is random. This is one of those McCarthy kicks in the teeth that you don't sense is coming until it happens.

Somehow I always end up with this sense of longing and regret for the past when I finish a McCarthy book. I feel miserable but love it all the same. show less

This morning I woke up and raced through finishing No Country For Old Men which I loved. The setting is southwest Texas where a botched drug deal has left multiple deaths, a substantial amount of heroin and some two million dollars, lying out in the morning desert sun. Moss, one of our three main characters happens upon the scene and can't resist taking the money and that sets in motion a tense and bloody cat and mouse game involving a Mexican drug cartel, a psychopath named Anton Chigurh and a local, wise, philosophical sheriff named Ed Tom. This short quick paced novel provides the reader with insights into all three men and the interplay of circumstances and consequences. Each chapter begins with a reflection from the Sheriff who is show more suffering some of his own demons from the Vietnam War and who is trying to solve this case as a way to make amends for past sins. His musings tend to reflect how much the country has changed and what has gone wrong. Here's Ed Tom::
"Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation."
Here is another:
"I think if you were Satan 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. Maybe he did"
From another perspective here's a great line from the murdering psychopath, Anton Chigurh-
"What happened to the old people? They’ve moved on to other things. Not everyone is suited to this line of work. The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one’s stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one’s enemies. Or discourages it."
I would recommend this book and will look forward to reading more of McCarthy's novels. show less

I worship at the dark altar that is Cormac McCarthy's fiction. The man is a prophet, and not a happy one either--he's Jeremiah, warning us of a dark future by showing us a dark present, yet demanding we keep at it anyway because, well, what choice have we got? And maybe, somewhere deep, maybe in just the recognition of that very darkness, we might happen across a bit of hope, or at least something like enough to hope that we'll keep on.

Still, this book is strangely diminished in light of McCarthy's other work. Even Chigurh, the much-celebrated "ultimate badass" of the film version, comes off weaker somehow than McCarthy's most terrifying and mesmerizing creation, the Judge in Blood Meridian. Maybe I suffer from having seen the movie show more first--and those who said the film remained faithful to the novel were sorely understating the fact: the film is word-for-word right out of the text, dialogue and voice-overs and all--but I think the worse problem is that in one or two places the film improved on the text. Which is not usually a good thing with fiction.

I won't say where, though, because the book is still outstanding and deserves a read, especially for those chapters at the end of the text that never made it (couldn't make it) into the film, and to be fair, the ending is one of McCarthy's more haunting, even if it is a quieter ending, and I think in the long run it'll stand among his best endings. His most timeless. show less

Bought the FS edition and had a new reason to reread this one. It's hard not to compare and contrast with the movie if you're a fan of that one as well; the editing choices made, what was cut, what was swapped around. The bulk of the story is the same, key scenes almost line for line. But some changes make you wonder, like substituting the hitchhiking teenager for a chance encounter with some woman at a motel, swapping a line declaring his integrity for his wife for a suggestion of impropriety - but on the other hand aging up his 19 year old sweetheart for the movie. Chigurh talks more and you get a few looks inside his mind in the book, which makes him less enigmatic than in the movie. Though a longer explanation of his chance driven show more ethos does little to dull his alien nature. The conversation of him being purely a force of nature is cut short in the book and the movie by his own chance encounter with mortality. Loose ends are wrapped up in the book that might not need tying up, as to what Chigurh ultimately does, the money, and what becomes of the mexican after the shootout.
Really the big change is how much time is given to Bell to philosophize about his views on how times have changed, and reflecting on his own views of meaning and chance, of his past and losing the battle that never was between him and Chigurh.
As always in McCarthy there's some shadow of a discussion about God lurking in the background, and a little ember of hope, in this book through the fire lit by Bell's father in his dream. In The Road, the fire that's carried by the boy and his father. A dim light in the big darkness of the universe, something to hold against the incomprehensibleness of evil. show less

This is a great book on two levels - style and content.

You have to enter into the laconic vernacular of the border country and see how McCarthy uses it to show how a few words in the right context can get you deeper into the emotions (or lack of them) of the main protagonists than long-winded description of feelings.

He manages the rare feat of showing how a basic decency, a sentimental decency, triumphs morally over cunning and intellect. He reminds us that 'sentiment', that is feeling one's values as givens without too much analysis, is not to be despised by those whose default mode is knowing irony. There is nothing post-modern about this book.

As for the content, this is a deeply political book without once mentioning politics, as show more most readers would understand it.

It implies not so much the regret for lost values that other reviewers have noted and which may be obvious in the text (but which it is arguable provided a mere interlude of integrity between the normal condition of self-centred violence in the American West) but a gentle questioning of patriotism when your country has drifted far away from your own ideals and understanding, when you don't know what you are fighting for (and putting ourself at risk for) any more, when it asks too much and gives so little in return.

The American working man's experiences in America's wars overseas is a running theme 'sotto voce', underpinning the account of one incident in what is really a civil war in all but name, one in which government agents and drug runners seem to be fighting over who actually represents the will of the American people.

The Sheriff seems to sense that urban America has chosen the other side to his by providing markets for the 'criminals'. The killer Chigurh is almost a parody of the Ayn Rand libertarian in his peculiar a-social determination to 'succeed' on his own terms. He is out of the 'Fountainhead' but with crime rather than architecture and art the model. He should be fascinating but is merely chilling - a half person compared to the much weaker hero.

This book might appear to be an elegy for an older America which has been left behind (that is how most would like to interpret it), but this reader detected a darker mood, an implied anger that the betrayal of simpler souls in matters of war and peace starts to return home at the border between America and the world outside.

A cold hell (represented by Chigurh) has seeped into the homeland, looking for opportunity. Of course, nothing is made quite that clear - but that is what happens in great art, and this is great art. show less

Excellent. Dark. Disturbing. Brilliant. The story is bare-bones, like the punctuation and the prose. Set in 1980, in the deserts and desolate towns of the Texas/Mexico borderlands, this novel explores the meaning of life, and the consequences of our choices, with a decidedly fatalistic tone. Except...except for the love. So many reviewers miss the love and the suggestion of hope underlying Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's introspective musings as he looks back on the violent events that led him to question his life, and ultimately to give up his office, not from fear, but apparently from a sense of futility. Except... except for this: "...he saw her and stopped and sat the horse and watched. She was riding along a red dirt ridge to the south show more sitting with her hands crossed on the pommel, looking toward the last of the sun...That's my heart yonder, he told the horse. It always was." Those are not the words of a man without hope. From what I saw of the Coen brothers' movie (the rental disc was defective and jumped over several chunks of the second half), it seems to me they concentrated on the wrong portions of this novel, as many of the reviewers do as well. The violence is all in there, but I think the Sheriff's contemplations are the heart of the book. I refrain from recommending it, because it is clearly a love-it-or-hate-it kind of novel, and there are only one or two people I'm sure are likely to love it. As for the rest of you...the best I can do is give you the option of deciding for yourself. Choose wisely.
April 2010 show less