by Cormac McCarthy
p. 2005
No Country for Old Men
is my second foray into the work of Cormac McCarthy, the first being the
apocalyptic father-son drama, The Road,
a few years back. Compared to The Road,
No Country for Old Men is like My Little Pony, but I do not say that to
disparage the latter; it’s still a very serious and contemplative book in its
own right, I only mention this to give some insight on my expectations of the
book prior to reading it.
No Country for Old Men
is what happens when an average joe stumbles upon an incomprehensible fortune
and suddenly becomes the most wanted man in Texas. Llewelyn Moss knows he’s
asking for trouble when he stumbles upon the aftermath of a deadly shootout
between drug dealers on the Mexican border and a suitcase full of millions left
unattended, but he decides to play his luck and take the money home, prompting
a whole menagerie of people it’s best not to mess with to give chase. Hot on
Moss’s trail are a tormented old sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, who only wants to see
Moss home safe to his loyal young wife, Mexican cartel members, and two rival
hitmen, mouthy former military man Carson Wells and laconic and exotic Anton
Chigurh, who is probably meant to be mysterious and fearsome, but comes off
more as an inhumanly evil caricature.
As in The Road, I
have to commend McCarthy for his economy with words. He has a way of saying
very much with very little and possesses a sort of southern sagacity that is
very effective. The monologues given by various characters are chock full of
quotables, though they are not very realistic depictions of dialogue.
Some times, though, I feel as though McCarthy is too judicious with his vocabulary, as
he has chosen here to leave out all forms of punctuation distinguishing
dialogue exchanges. Without quotation marks, it’s often hard to tell when
someone stops talking and starts thinking, and in long exchanges between two
characters, I sometimes had to go back a few paragraphs, to the last time an
indicator was used, to remember who was saying what. This gets a bit tedious
after awhile, and emphasizes the exact reason why we traditionally employ
transitional phrases in writing.
My other, lesser issue with No Country for Old Men is that there doesn’t seem to be a point to
it all. Lots of stuff happens off screen, so to speak—important stuff, and there are too many threads full of sparsely
developed characters. The style in which it is written suggests that maybe all
of these threads will converge at the climax and we’ll see what it all means...
but they don’t. They never come together, the bad guy wins, the ‘good guy’
learns nothing he didn’t already know, and you get the feeling that everything that made these characters potentially intriguing happened long before we met them.
And maybe this is one of those stories where you’re not supposed to learn anything, where there’s
not supposed to be a point, where life
is random and unfair and doesn’t mean anything (now that I think about it, the
Coen brothers were the perfect people
to adapt this novel to film), but, well, those kinds of stories have always
been hit or miss with me anyway.
I do recommend this book though, on the whole. It makes for an
engaging leisurely summer read, which sounds contradictory, but is really just my way of saying you'll be on the edge of your seat while reading it, but when you are done, you'll put the book down and probably not think about it much after that. As I’d said before, even if there is nothing
else to sort through, the dialogue is rich enough to keep you rooted to the
page... even if half of that is spent just trying to figure out what is going
on.
