No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
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Book Summary Information
Author: Cormac McCarthyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-07-11
ISBN: 0375706674
Number of pages: 309
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of No Country for Old Men
Book Review: An artistic and commercial triumph
Summary: 4 Stars
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.
--the opening stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats
The theme of Yeats' poem is the impermanence of this world, and so he set sail "To the holy city of Byzantium" where things are made of more permanent stuff such "as Grecian goldsmiths make" and where things are eternal like ideas.
But what has this to do with Cormac McCarthy's mesmerizing and seductive narrative?
Well, perhaps not as much as McCarthy thought when he came up with the title or when he began his tale. One thing is clear, the bloody violence of the border towns of West Texas about which he writes resemble more "the mackerel-crowded seas" than the holy city of Byzantium, and the "sensual music" is the sound of bullet hitting bone from those dying generations at their song.
The novel is a triumph, both artistically and commercially for the gifted Mr. McCarthy, one of many. What I think aspiring novelists can learn from this is that the power of voice, story and character easily triumphs over any kind of defect that might exist in technique or composition. McCarthy makes his own artistic rules as spins out his tales like shining dimes shimmering across a waxed counter--or dimes thrown in the air to land on heads or tails to decide if you live or die, which is what happens to a couple of the characters in this tale.
Anton Chigurh is the ironically triumphant character in the novel, with the passably human Llewelyn Moss his counterpoint and foil. Chigurh is a psychopath with a code: you harm, insult or even inconvenience me and you die. (Maybe sometimes just for sport I'll flip a coin and if you call it right I'll let you live.) Moss is a fated character who made one fatal error. He's tough and tenacious but a bit out of his league versus Chigurh who is something like the terminator made flesh. All behave like driven animals with the exception of Sheriff Bell who is reflective and philosophic. He is the old man who learns that this is no longer the country for him.
The plot centers around a dope drop in the semi-desert gone bad that Moss stumbles onto some time after the shooting has stopped. Bodies everywhere. Bullet holes in vehicles, blood, etc. And one guy still alive begging for agua. I aint got no water, Moss tells him. Shrewd and with an eye to gaining something big, he's thinking about other things, like where's the money? He follows the bloody trail of someone carrying something heavy and finds him and it. It's a carrying case full of used hundred dollar bills.
He takes the case and heads home to his wife, has a beer, etc. But in the middle of the night he returns to the scene, and it is here that McCarthy begins to allow the plot to get a little shabby and the logic to go south. Why does he return? He says, "Somethin I forgot to do." Apparently what he forgot to do is give the dying Mexican some water. Funny thing about that. It's 12 hours later at one o'clock in the morning when he remembers this and it's another hour and fifteen before he reaches the Mexican who is now freshly dead with what appears to be a brand new bullet hole in his forehead.
When reading this I thought Moss had returned possibly to get the heroin or maybe to shoot the Mexican who might be able to identify him. But no, Moss's fatal flaw is his kindness.
His kindness! I guess he didn't realize that bringing the man who had been bleeding for a day or two some water wasn't really going to help. If he wanted to help he could have dialed 911.
There are some other minor plot problems and loose ends, but they really don't matter. What matters is McCarthy's brilliant prose, the flawless dialogue, the masterful sketches of the land, and especially his lean narrative that makes the action and the characters vivid and indelible.
Although I have termed this an artistic and commercial triumph I would not call it an unqualified success. The loose ends, the mixed narratives in which Bell appears both in the first person and in the omniscient third, the slight development of most of the characters--although what is developed is very good--and the admixture of an existential ending with Bell's attempts to find a greater meaning are disconcerting. But I don't think McCarthy was much worried about any of this. His intense involvement with the struggles and experiences of his characters is what probably gave him the most artistic satisfaction. Straightening up the details would not be as important.
By the way, the Coen brothers of Fargo (1996) movie fame, violence meisters themselves, whose first film, Blood Simple (1984), was set in Texas, have made a film adapted from McCarthy's novel set for release August 7, 2007. It will star Josh Brolin as Moss, Woody Harrelson as Wells, Tommy Lee Jones as Bell, and Javier Bardem as Chigurh. It should be a doosie. The screenplay must have been easy to write since McCarthy's novel is so very visual and so full of clever stuff.
I have to say I don't like the fact that one of our most successful and brilliant novelists is a master of violence. Is it an accident that the public has rewarded him, or is it the case that he is a product of his times and rides the Zeitgeist? We are living in an age of escalating violence and perhaps that is reflected in our literature.
Summary of No Country for Old Men
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 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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