Philadelphia Inquirer // No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
A brutal tale of good and evil, filled with gray areas
Reviewed by Andrew Ervin
No Country for Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf. 306 pp. $24.95
Cormac McCarthy is best known for All the Pretty Horses, a sparkling novel that - like Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Charles Portis' True Grit - has helped return the literary pedigree to the Wild West potboiler tradition. McCarthy's true masterpiece, Blood Meridian, has garnered less popular attention, but for better or worse, that's the book to which everything else he writes will likely be compared, including this new one, No Country for Old Men.
Our narrator, Bell, is a sheriff forced to bear witness to any number of atrocities during a murderous rampage on his watch. He peppers his telling of those events with anecdotes of his own and in doing so serves the same general function as a Greek chorus, being both inside and outside the action.
The hero of his story, Llewelyn Moss, has the bad fortune of finding $2 million. Out in the desert one day, he stumbles upon the bloody carnage of an apparent drug deal that didn't totally pan out. That night, for no obvious reason, he returns to the scene of the crime and grabs the suitcase full of money. Another gang of bad guys chases him down, and they soon learn his identity from the registration of his abandoned truck.
The hellhound on his trail is named Chigurh, a bounty hunter who kills his victims, and steals cars, using a powerful industrial machine usually reserved for slaughtering cattle. He's a terrific, old-fashioned villain - one with a real flair for the dramatic - and one mean guy. Chigurh's as heartless as they come. He has to be (like everyone else's, his spoken parts arrive without the distraction of quotation marks):
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 attention of one's enemies or discourages it.
McCarthy's distinctive style - little punctuation and sentences as sharp as barbed wire - earns him many comparisons to Faulkner, which I suppose is reasonable. But it's a radical approach to morality that distinguishes his novels from those of his contemporaries. Good and evil definitely exist in Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, but they're not necessarily in opposition. Sometimes they're indistinguishable. That makes the fundamental logic of his books, their moral codes, feel both incredibly foreign to us but also somehow far more complicated and nuanced and more realistic than what you find in most stories.
Bell, a wise old man disgusted by the excesses of the modern world, appears to act as some kind of moral compass for the novel. It's also possible, though, that he serves another purpose. Through him, McCarthy seems to be critiquing the ways in which our culture glorifies the past without recognizing that the good old days were just as corrupt and violent as the present.
Entering into McCarthy's world is an exhilarating experience and, when you leave it, your own world not only feels somehow altered, but the distance between the two begins to look negligible. No living American writer better understands the gray areas that exist between good and evil. And no reckoning of 20th- and 21st-century fiction can be complete without having spent some time with Blood Meridian and, to be sure, No Country for Old Men. McCarthy is a storyteller of the highest rank, capable of exposing the artifice behind the stories that make us who we are.
Reviewed by Andrew Ervin
No Country for Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy
Knopf. 306 pp. $24.95
Cormac McCarthy is best known for All the Pretty Horses, a sparkling novel that - like Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down and Charles Portis' True Grit - has helped return the literary pedigree to the Wild West potboiler tradition. McCarthy's true masterpiece, Blood Meridian, has garnered less popular attention, but for better or worse, that's the book to which everything else he writes will likely be compared, including this new one, No Country for Old Men.
Our narrator, Bell, is a sheriff forced to bear witness to any number of atrocities during a murderous rampage on his watch. He peppers his telling of those events with anecdotes of his own and in doing so serves the same general function as a Greek chorus, being both inside and outside the action.
The hero of his story, Llewelyn Moss, has the bad fortune of finding $2 million. Out in the desert one day, he stumbles upon the bloody carnage of an apparent drug deal that didn't totally pan out. That night, for no obvious reason, he returns to the scene of the crime and grabs the suitcase full of money. Another gang of bad guys chases him down, and they soon learn his identity from the registration of his abandoned truck.
The hellhound on his trail is named Chigurh, a bounty hunter who kills his victims, and steals cars, using a powerful industrial machine usually reserved for slaughtering cattle. He's a terrific, old-fashioned villain - one with a real flair for the dramatic - and one mean guy. Chigurh's as heartless as they come. He has to be (like everyone else's, his spoken parts arrive without the distraction of quotation marks):
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 attention of one's enemies or discourages it.
McCarthy's distinctive style - little punctuation and sentences as sharp as barbed wire - earns him many comparisons to Faulkner, which I suppose is reasonable. But it's a radical approach to morality that distinguishes his novels from those of his contemporaries. Good and evil definitely exist in Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, but they're not necessarily in opposition. Sometimes they're indistinguishable. That makes the fundamental logic of his books, their moral codes, feel both incredibly foreign to us but also somehow far more complicated and nuanced and more realistic than what you find in most stories.
Bell, a wise old man disgusted by the excesses of the modern world, appears to act as some kind of moral compass for the novel. It's also possible, though, that he serves another purpose. Through him, McCarthy seems to be critiquing the ways in which our culture glorifies the past without recognizing that the good old days were just as corrupt and violent as the present.
Entering into McCarthy's world is an exhilarating experience and, when you leave it, your own world not only feels somehow altered, but the distance between the two begins to look negligible. No living American writer better understands the gray areas that exist between good and evil. And no reckoning of 20th- and 21st-century fiction can be complete without having spent some time with Blood Meridian and, to be sure, No Country for Old Men. McCarthy is a storyteller of the highest rank, capable of exposing the artifice behind the stories that make us who we are.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
7/27/2005
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