No Country for Old Men

By

Cormac McCarthy

Reviewed

By

Stephen Studach...

Picador
309 Pages
$ 24.95
First published 2005.
This edition 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-330-45453-7

And Mammon laughed.

Not strictly a Dark Fantasy genre piece, if this falls anywhere it’s probably in Contemporary Western Thriller territory, though elements of it defy those conventions as well. Defying and denying genres is often a good idea. If you create something it will fall into the boxes naturally enough, and eager hands will seek to brand it. There is enough dark speculating in this work to warrant its examination here.

The land this story stands in is composed of rock and ridges and large open stretches that shimmer in heat haze and generate mirages. Out there hawks hover, prairie wolves range and rattlesnakes wait. You’re at the borders of physical and mental states there, in cowboy boots on hot sand that fast bakes spilt blood black, and the flies come soon enough.

In such a place men and women don’t need the landscape to gift them with delusions. But the landscape is always there.

                                Nothin’ wounded goes uphill.

A quick read written in down-home language, this novel nevertheless addresses some tough issues and concerns itself with ordinary human beings struggling with questions that have no clear answers.

Young, new writers, working in the modern context of fiction should find some solid, easy lessons in the text. How to write tight and taut. How to keep prose running smooth and fast and close to the bone yet still build detailed character from it. Easy back and forth dialogue, no strain there.

For my money the past master of high energy prose would have to be David Morrell. His First Blood debut novel from 1972 was something different then and still stands as the exemplar of the machinegun belt school of delivery. Broken text, rapid fire pace, multiple viewpoints and shifts, some of the numbered sections in that book are only a few paragraphs in length. All adding up to a rollicking, cinematic freefall reading experience. For a long time now that style has been the norm, but Morrell helped carve the benchmark.

In the same trail dusty breath I would also, in that regard, like to recommend the "Edge" series of westerns by Englishman George G. Gilman (G.G. is one of the Piccadilly Cowboys) which originated from New English Library in 1971.

A Pulitzer Prize winner McCarthy knows his stuff. This is the first book of his that I have read, led there by the intriguing trailer for the film, which, weeks later, won several Oscars. Unlike the Billy Bob Thornton directed All The Pretty Horses, this Coen brothers venture seems to promise a worthwhile viewing experience. Possibly the first completely satisfying Coen film since Barton Fink.

For all its southwest country homilies and nice turns of phrase the novel never becomes saccharine with sentimentality and it holds a realist edge you could cut meat with.

Killing someone is relatively easy, saving someone is a whole different matter.

* * *

                                The sheriff shook his head. Dope, he said.
                                Dope.
                                They sell that shit to schoolkids.
                                It’s worse than that.
                                How’s that?
                                Schoolkids buy it. 

Set in a time not that long after the Vietnam conflict, the self inflicted wounds of that and prior wars not having even begun to heal, this nihilistic tragedy lost in the wasted dead lands of a semi mythical frontier sputters here and there when the author lets the dialogue or the recollectin’ and country cogitatin’ carry too long, but not often so.

Character wise we have Llewlyn Moss, out hunting early one morning, he finds what appears to be the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad and, a little further on, another corpse, a gun, and a leather document case full of money. Lots of money. Seeming to have more than a vague idea what picking up that case and running with it will mean, Moss picks up the case and runs with it all the same. The inexorable events follow him. Inexorability seems to be embodied in the form of his primary pursuer Anton Chigurh. You know he’s trouble soon as you meet him. A mystery. A force of nature. An elemental who carries an abattoir bolt-gun, a muffled shotgun and an inhuman calm in his kit of tools. He could give Doctor Lecter or Cape Fear's Max Cady a run for their money. At that, he’s simply ultra business-like, and very good at his job. (Of course Scorsese took ‘Cape Fear’ and made it into a memorable horror film. Given the chance to play Frankenstein’s creation in the Branagh treatment De Niro’s monster was a dud compared to his take on Cady.) Then there’s Sheriff Bell, whose italicized thoughts and reminiscences hold the main narrative together and add that extra dimension. Llewlyn’s young wife, Bell’s wife, a man named Carson Wells, who provides just a little more insight into Chigurh, but not much, all the main characters are keenly drawn.

                                When you’ve said that it’s real and not just in your head I’m not all that sure what it is you have said.
 
The case full of cash scenario has been used well and not so well in the past. I believe that this book falls into the former camp. Cinematically the novel and film seem to suggest a throwback to that era of genre that gave us Welcome to Hard Times (1967), McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Mongo’s Back in Town (1971 telemovie), The Getaway (1972), through Kill Charley Varrick (1973) and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) to Trespass (1992), Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995) and A Simple Plan (1998). But there is more to the book than one strand, it has more meat on its bones than that.