Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 23 Apr 2019
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
After the immense rigours of his Border trilogy – a sort of philosophical Western characterised by the lean, ascetic, unornamented hardscrabble prose style that has become the hallmark of late-period Cormac McCarthy – it seems the writer needed to turn to something slightly less demanding. His 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men seems – at least at first sight – to be a similar updating of a genre style, this time the tough, hardboiled ‘noir’ fiction of the likes of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson.
The setting is the lawless badlands of the Texas border; the time is 1980. Sherriff ‘Ed Tom’ Bell is an old-fashioned good guy, a second-generation lawman, much given to cracker-barrel philosophising, and these ruminations are interspersed – eventually rather tediously, I have to say – throughout the book. Drug-running is bringing a new level of lawlessness and brutality to the old world of US law-keeping. The novel opens with a relatively incidental character, Moss, a Vietnam vet, a welder by trade, stumbling on a cluster of shot-up vehicles and eight or nine dead bodies in the Texas desert. A drug deal gone wrong. A car-boot full of heroin. A satchel containing well over two million dollars. For Moss, who lives with his young wife in a trailer while coasting from one poorly paid job to the next, the temptation is too great. He has no interest in the drugs but he takes the money. You know, as they say, that this can’t end well.
And of course you’re right. But what the reader doesn’t yet know – but might conceivably guess, especially if he or she is sufficiently steeped in the kind of brutality that McCarthy is capable of in his most Grand Guignol writing – is just how appallingly things will turn out.
For in true McCarthy style, the freelance hit man dispatched to retrieve the money and drugs and punish everyone in any way involved in the deal going wrong is one of the writer’s bloodiest and most frightening inventions: an affectless, unfeeling abomination called Chigurh (possibly pronounced ‘Sugar’), who is never without a silenced, sawn-down shotgun and an abattoir stun gun and compressed air cylinder. If that sounds unlikely it seems to become more plausible when one realises that to all intents and purposes Chigurh is the angel of death. Whatever other faults McCarthy may have, he can never be accused of under-egging his violence – nor of failing to raise it to metaphysical levels.
I won’t spoil what relatively little plot there is by explaining what happens because you can probably guess anyway, and if this kind of thing attracts you then you’ll simply want to buckle in tightly for the ride.
When I first read this around the time it came out I will admit I was disappointed. On the one hand, it seemed too close to parody to be entirely satisfactory; on the other, what could have been a fantastically compelling – and compulsive – thriller seemed let down by slack plotting and some dreadfully portentous touches. I read it again to see whether my views had changed.
To some degree, they had. I found in it subtleties that I had missed on first reading. For example, I’m not sure I had realised that the novel is set in 1980. I hadn’t entirely registered Sherriff Ed Tom’s bewildered horror at the plague of lawlessness and unparalleled violence an emergent drugs trade was unleashing. Respect for the law, the values of the Old West, a lifetime’s service founded on the kind of valour and self-sacrifice learnt during the Second World War – Sherriff Ed Tom is not just an anachronism, a man out of time, he is also one suspects the mouthpiece for McCarthy’s own conservative pessimism and anguish.
This isn’t quite the parodic, near-film script thriller that some critics dismissed it as, I don’t think. But oddly, I think it might be a better and more compelling book if it was. As it is, what should be sleek and unstoppable turns out at times to be rather lumpy and portentous. Its greatest bits are incendiary, as is always the case with McCarthy, and the prose will make the hair on the back of your neck prickle. The existential anguish and the insights McCarthy offers into awfulness of all kinds will almost certainly give readers of a delicate disposition nightmares. And yet ultimately, I was again left feeling that the book doesn’t quite work. Where it should be utterly and ruthlessly clear it is sometimes obtuse and vague; where it should have maximum velocity it sometimes dawdles to a standstill; where it should thrill it sometimes puzzles.
McCarthy’s writing can hold the reader in an appalling vice-like grip, making it impossible to turn away even – and perhaps especially – at those times when you really would rather look elsewhere. But this novel doesn’t quite achieve that. Now, whether this means it is a flawed masterpiece, I’m not sure: I have read enough McCarthy to realise that nothing he does is unintentional. And so, in another five or ten years, I shall probably find myself reading this yet again, trying to decide why Cormac McCarthy sometimes writes the most contrary books imaginable.
Alun Severn
April 2019
Cormac McCarthy elsewhere on Letterpress:
Cormac McCarthy lives: author is the victim of a bizarre Twitter death hoax