No Country for Old Men

One thing is apparent from the start of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men: the pace of the book is rapid-fire, and it won't take long to burn through it. There is certainly an entertainment value to No Country for Old Men that is undeniable, even if the novel is not without its flaws.

McCarthy is our nation's foremost living chronicler of the violence and depravity of the American West. Set in 1980, No Country for Old Men draws on the themes from McCarthy's Old West novels but animates them with a more contemporary crime-drama aesthetic. The disregard for human life that accompanied the westward expansion has become in this novel the disregard for human life that accompanies the drug trade from Mexico, and the action of the novel recounts Llewelynn Moss's tragic attempt to get away with a briefcase full of somebody else's money. (Who exactly the money, orphaned after a drug deal gone awry, belongs to is a question that cannot be answered in any simple terms.) As Moss's unstoppable pursuer, Anton Chigurh is another embodiment of McCarthy's The Judge, from 1985's Blood Meridian, still McCarthy's best (and most disturbing) novel. Chigurh is perhaps more human than the quasi-mystical Judge, but both characters relentlessly pursue an ethic of violence that McCarthy uses to convey an Old Testament message that is central to his work: that violence is one of the mechanisms that animates the world, that no matter how civilized we may become the specter of it will always pursue us.

Ultimately, what is most appealing about the novel is the off-center dynamic between the characters. Moss may be at the center of the action here, but what really gives the novel shape is the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who stands at the periphery of events throughout the novel, but who is rattled by them as surely as the reader is. In this way, McCarthy uses Bell as a stand-in for the reader. Just as we bear witness to this story of harrowing bloodshed, so does Bell, whose faith in simple goodness is sorely abused by what he sees. McCarthy might be suggesting that we are as powerless to stop the violence of the world as Bell is to stop the violence that takes place in his Texas border county. There is a certain conservatism, perhaps apolitical in nature, that pervades McCarthy's work. In McCarthy's view of the universe, nothing ever really changes. We're still taking scalps; we just don't put them on display anymore.

Most poignantly, Bell, a representative of law, order, and civilization, comes to realize that the only reason he makes it out of this situation alive is that he is utterly ineffectual to stop any of this violence. He doesn't register even as a blip on the bad guys' radar screen. The life and death drama might as well take place out of the law's jurisdiction; the citizens Bell is elected and paid to protect die on his watch. McCarthy presents Bell to us as the pinnacle of what we might call "decency" -- honesty, simplicity, earnestness, fortitude -- but he is ineffectual in the wake of this evil. Thus the title phrase, lifted from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," takes on new meaning in the context of Bell's internal crisis. Is there any country anywhere that can serve as a fit and proper home for a man who hopes to cling to a vision of decency that he suddenly realizes is obsolete? Obsolete perhaps because it was only an illusion to begin with.

There's much to admire in this novel, but there are also some moments that are cringe-worthy. The prose in the third-person narrative segments is strong: the images are leaner than those of other McCarthy novels, the action more streamlined, the dialogue more fluent much of the time, but as the novel progresses some of the dialogue becomes too heavily freighted with the kind of pseudo-philosophical rambling that bogged down No Country's predecessors, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The third-person chapters in the novel are punctuated by shorter italicized first-person segments, told from Bell's perspective. Some of Bell's passages devolve into a kind of aw-shucks cornpone that clashes jarringly with the rest of the narrative. Many of these segments could have been excised, the result being a stronger novel.

As is, No Country for Old Men is a good novel, but cutting a few dozen pages would have made it great.