No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Posted in review, western, thrillers, fiction, contemporary on August 12th, 2005Review by Dave Geiman
No Country for Old Men has been reviewed, not just favorably, but gushingly, by every reviewer I have read over the past month or so. For example, Michael Dirda of The Washington Post Book World called it “an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book.” And The Sunday Times of London says, “His fiction is heroic and somber…”
No one in any review anywhere mentioned that this book might just be the literary equivalent to a Steven Seagal movie without an ending, a morality play that impolitely slaps you in the face and a none-too-subtle commentary on current society that includes such gems as the loss of the war in Vietnam being the result of not taking God into the battle with us.
Llewelyn Moss, a welder out hunting antelope near the Mexican border in west Texas, finds some shot-out vehicles, dead men, heroin and the more than $2 million in cash meant to pay for the drugs. Why both the drugs and the money are still there always remains a mystery. Llewelyn takes the money, of course, as there are no heroes in this basic story. He then reveals himself to be one of the least competent characters in any mystery novel not involving brain damage. Llewelyn is sought by an agent for the original owners of the property- a free-lance sociopath who is colorful, if not enchanting, in his killing techniques and his sense of personal morality. This character, Anton Chigurh, is in many respects the best reason to read the book.
McCarthy has been taken to task, on one notable occasion at least, for writing sentences that have color but lack meaning. Color without meaning is sometimes forgivable if it adds sufficiently to the story. In this book McCarthy has chosen a color vehicle that involves the selective absence of apostrophes in such words as "cant" and "dont," but not in "that’s" or "where’d" or "they’ll" and "it’s," an inconsistent absence which just slows down the reading. Do people who speak english (sic) improperly fail to apostrophize the words "cant" and "dont" in their heads, but apply them to it’s and that’s and where’d?
This book was never meant to be just a high plains western thriller. But a well-written novel deserves a better plot line and more resolution, even if the events are meant to embody seemingly random violence as a foil for commentary on morality. We all know by now that drug smugglers are frequently vicious, immoral people who are, or employ, sociopaths and psychopaths to carry out their bloody tasks. We also know there wouldn’t be drugs and drug dealers if there weren’t users. No new news here.
What is the new news in this book then? That there is honor in a sociopathic killer keeping the promises he makes to himself? That this fixed system of morality may have virtues lost in the rest of the country’s slide into Godlessness and disrespect? (This is the first book I have read in more than thirty years that uses the word Mammon.)
No Country for Old Men is worth the read for Chigurh and the atmosphere of the Texas/New Mexico border with old Mexico. Just as importantly, the book reveals that contrived plots, contrived abuse of grammatical rules and stale commentary do not make a work a masterpiece. It's already been done, over and over, by Steven Seagal.