No Country for Old Men
July 14th 2008 21:20
In the past I have reviewed two of Cormac McCarthy’s books on this blog … All the Pretty Horses and just recently The Road. I’m a big fan, finding his sparse-like dialogue quite ingenious. But I had no plans of reading No Country for Old Men simply because its storyline did not really appeal to me. It all sounded a little too “Bang ‘em up outlawish” for me.
But as quite often happens, I found myself holding this book and made the karmic decision to take it home (what I was reading at the time was dragging just a tad). And of course I wasn’t disappointed. McCarthy had done it again, pulled me into a place I had no desire to be, but proceeded to suck me in so deep there was no way out other than through the back door, via the last page!
As with all of McCarthy’s novels, there is much more in them than first appears, but in a nutshell, so to speak, Sheriff Bell begins the sad and sorry search for psychopath Anton Chigurh who, in turn is pursuing the unwise individual who spirited away his client’s shipment of drugs and satchel of money, leaving a trail of blood and destruction behind. Chigurh is a hard case and takes after his prey with a machine like precision that under McCarthy’s hand frankly scares one’s pants off! The violence in the book is always present, even without reams of gory dialogue and detail. What you do end up with amongst the sawed-off shotguns, home-made silencers and pissed-off cartels is a simple story of greed and a mercenary mindset that will bring a country to its knees. McCarthy has a way of training the scope on today’s America that exposes shallow layers of a society on the brink … and that can be the scariest thing of all!
They’ve turned this into an Oscar winning film (which I have yet to see) but have been told is extremely violent … something that would be hard to avoid given this book’s content. But if you’re like me and can do without the visuals, go the literature path and see how a great writer can really put the wind up an audience … without the screen.
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Comment by Daniel Mason
You should really check out the movie (there's a review for it over on my blog). As far as adaptations go it's pretty much spot-on. Much of the dialogue is lifted directly from McCarthy's pages, and even the bold decision to kill off a character without seeing it happen remains intact. It deserved the Oscar.