a novel by
Cormac McCarthy
Alfred A.
Knopf: 320 pp., $24.95
It is said that authors only
learn from other authors and foolish is the writer whose favorite
is himself. Know now that this reviewer's favorite is Cormac
McCarthy, but don't let this admission color your decision to read
or not McCarthy's new novel of the New West.
"No Country for Old Men" is a hell of a read, but it's not your
usual McCarthy and it's not what the logophiles among his
disciples might expect.
It's a page turner alright,
and nobody segues like McCarthy. The avid will read it all at
once, but one doesn't read Cormac McCarthy just to find out what
happens next. You read him for the stories, yes, but perhaps even
more for the words and his arrangement of them. You don't just
read his books, you re-read them, savor them. In "No Country for
Old Men", McCarthy's first book in seven years, he examines human
nature through the same dark glass that colors all his works, but
the engrossing narrative description is pared to the bone and you
probably won't need your Oxford English Dictionary.
Like most literary geniuses,
it only took McCarthy twenty-four years to become an overnight
success.
"All the Pretty Horses" was
a bestseller in 1992 and won both the National Book Critics Circle
and National Book awards. The movie from which it was made was
surprisingly faithful to the book and has become a classic. Up
until then, however, most of McCarthy's fans were other writers:
His first five books, though now enjoying a brisk revival,
averaged only about 3,000 copies sold apiece. Published about five
and a half years apart, "Outer Dark", (1968), "Child of God", "Suttree"
and "Blood Meridian", McCarty's masterpiece so far, were hardly
mass market fare in their time, but his readers are evangelistic
and his work is now compared, (by those who compare things), to
Faulkner, Hemingway, et al. It's an invidious comparison; McCarthy
is the better writer.
After "Blood Meridian", set
in the 1840s, came "The Crossing" and "Cities of the Plain",
which, with "All the Pretty Horses" completed what is known as the
Border Trilogy, about young horsemen who live, love, and die in
the TexMex borderlands of the 1940s. Now comes "No Country for Old
Men" and McCarthy says things have only gotten worse. Much worse.
Each of the thirteen
chapters opens with a monologue by the book's protagonist, Ed Tom
Bell, an old border county sheriff on the eve of retirement who
feels the need to tell us about his career and his country and
society's decline. His are intimate revelations as to an old
friend visiting on the porch of his Texas ranch house. The last
thing he wanted or expected was for his county to be the location
of a drug deal gone murderously bad, but when Llewelen Moss, a
local Viet Nam veteran and accomplished sniper happens upon a
bloodsoaked scene in the desert while hunting antelope, Sheriff
Bell becomes inextricably involved in a race with minions of the
devil who embrace an evil philosophy without referents in his
county or experience.
One of the drug runners
somehow escaped into the brush and Moss discovers him dead in the
catclaw with a satchel stuffed with $2.5 million cash with which
Moss absquatulates. It's outlaw money after all. But Moss is
curious. He stops to rummage the machine-gunned pickups and
corpses and finds the heroin and one driver not quite dead yet who
begs for agua. He has no interest in the heroin, but the suffering
man appeals to his compassion and he returns to his own truck, a
great distance off, and brings back water. It is the wrong thing
to do. The man is now dead, freshly shot through head and the
dope, of course, is gone. Unknown others are now involved, and the
hunter has become the hunted.
Moss narrowly escapes death
there on the spot and goes home to his wife to plan his next move,
but he has no notion of the expertise and resources of the two
assassins assigned to recover the money, one from each side of the
deadly drug deal. They are Carson Wells and Anton Chigurh, ex
Special Ops soldiers turned hired guns. Wells is just a
professional in it for the money, but Chigurh is a psychopath
reminiscent of Judge Holden from "Blood Meridian", a demiurge
dispensing ineluctable death while seeming to be un-killable
himself. Ed Tom Bell struggles to assemble meager and cryptic
clues into some decipherable pattern and halt the carnage, but he
and his methods and morality are of another time and he knows he
can no longer protect and serve his constituents in the face of
our new reverse evolution. A reporter asks him why crime is out of
hand in his jurisdiction. "It starts when you begin to overlook
bad manners", he tells her.
"Anytime you quit hearin'
Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight."
McCarthy crafts his
antagonists skillfully. They are the people we see on the news and
read about in the papers, inveterate degenerates who have long
foresworn all concern for consequence, apolitical and atheistic
terrorists undeterred even unto death. Our elastic tolerance of
all behaviors no matter how foul and unnatural and the new morally
lazy relativism that replaces personal responsibility with
"political correctness", leaves Sheriff Bell and the rest of us of
his generation thankful we were born no later than we were.
So consider this inadequate
scholium just an introduction and judge his latest novel by your
own standards. "Blood Meridian" was a cautionary tale from the
past. Now Cormac McCarthy has seen the future and brother it is
murder. It's like Ed Tom says, "...if this ain't a mess it'll do
'till one comes along." More and more, it seems, ours is "No
Country for Old Men".
