Review of No Country for Old Men

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, take out a coin and flip it. Don’t worry about the outcome, though. According to the novel, the result may already be preordained.