Title: No Country For Old Men
Genre: Novel
Year: 2005
Pages: 310
Origin: bought second-hand
Nod Rating: 4 nods out of 5
'That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing‐masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come'
'Sailing to Byzantium', by Y.B. Yeats
Famed American thriller writer, Cormac McCarthy, pinched – as all good writers are prone to do – words from the opening line of Yeats’ poem for the title of his 2005 novel. Better known as the Cohen brothers resulting Oscar winning film, this story follows the chase and contrasting view-points of three men: the devilishly evil Anton Chigurh; the plucky chancer Llewellyn Moss; and the older sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
The plot finds Moss stumbling across a drug deal gone bad; dead bodies litter the ground and a bag of millions has been left. Thinking his chance has come, Moss grabs the cash. But the cash has an owner, and hitman and sociopath Chigurh is sent in to reclaim it. Shoot outs abound in this book of cat and mouse, with the sheriff always two steps behind in attempting to help Moss and solve the crime. These three men all had different, at times, competing philosophies. There is the sheriff of the old ways and the old world, and Chigurh – a new breed, ready for the cold, clinical and soulless future. Moss himself is stuck between these two worlds – wanting glory and being selfish to go for it, but finding himself unprepared.
Brilliantly played by Javier Bardem in the Cohen brothers’ film, the essence and menace of Chigurh is present within McCarthy’s text. If anything, he is shown to be even more violent, with various shoot-outs being done away in the film. He toys with those around him, using a symbolic coin as the surveyor of destiny; something that McCarthy devotes considerable detail, especially in Chigurh’s conversation with the unwitting gas-station owner. Better informed of Chigurh’s threatening motives is another, less powerful, hitman, Wells. Chigurh discusses his own unrelenting ethical code to his work, all of which results in Wells’ demise in a passage that shows off McCarthy’s ability to string a well crafted sentence:
‘Just you do it. You godammed psychopath. Do it and goddam you to hell.One of the story’s unsettling moments is Chigurh’s visit to Moss’s young widow, after Moss has been erased from the story. He finds her and kills her having made a promise to Moss that he would; the widow tries to reason, saying how such a promise doesn’t make sense any longer, now that Moss is dead. But Chigurh explains himself:
He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women had known. The faces of men as they died on their knees before him. The body of a child dead in a roadside ravine in another country. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked up the empty casing off the rug and blew into it and put it in his pocket and looked at his watch. The new day was still a minute away.’
‘I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.’The sheriff is not simply a bystander to events; his voice provides the heart of the novel, being interspersed within the action. His words are a stark contrast to the shoot-outs and action depicted in the novel. A man of older times, he realises his time and generation are passing as the body-count rises:
‘I don’t know. I used to say they were the same ones we’ve always had to deal with. Same ones my granddaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustling cattle. Now they’re runnin dope. But I don’t know as that’s true no more. I’m like you. I ain’t sure we’ve seen these people before. Their kind. I don’t know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they’d have to build an annex to hell.’The sheriff has the last word in the novel, recounting his dream that includes his late father in a seemingly clouded purpose. Bumbling could be one word used to describe this, but the Worm is more charitable in believing that McCarthy is attempting to illustrate the divide, beliefs and values of the different generations of characters within the text. Being set in 1980, before the current IT revolution, it was a time in the last throes of customs that had benefited the industrialising world. Today, in 2013, the last vestiges of the old world are fading around us. Sheriff Ed Tom would surely be a relic, just thirty years later.
But all is not well with the novel. McCarthy’s lack of inverted commas for dialogue is confusing at times, bringing the Worm to wave his fist in annoyance on many a page. Having minimal knowledge of McCarthy’s previous work, the Worm is left wondering why such a tactic is employed. It could be a stylistic feature, as seen – better utilised – by other writers, notably Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. Or, as the Worm’s suspects, it could be a telling mark from the story’s previous incarnation as a screenplay: why bother adding all those pesky speech-marks? (The Worm realises all he need do is walk into any book-shop and find the ‘M’ section, open up a different McCarthy book, and find the answer… but that would be far too simple, wouldn’t it, dear reader.)
One bugbear of many a-viewer of the Cohen brothers’ film was the exclusion of Moss’s final death scene. Moss acts, in many ways, as the central mover of the story, and we – the reader/viewer – invest in him in attempting to survive or tie up the plot in a satisfactory way. Like the film, McCarthy does away with any such resolution. In fact, the book focuses more on Moss’s return to action after his bloody shoot-out with Chigurh, as he picks up a young-female hitchhiker. But yet that resolution is missing, with McCarthy’s cheekily moving the focus away. With Moss’s death, the reader is left with Chigurh’s fury and the sheriff’s same reflecting manner. For this, the Worm praises the author (and to a lesser extent to the Cohen brothers for having the courage to stick to the source material) in utilising this move in the plot. It complexes and unsettles the reader; putting us in a position where we never usually find ourselves, both within written fiction and in the cinema.
Although it falls just short when compared to its cinematic brother, McCarthy’s No County For Old Men is an engaging book that asks many questions, but fails – intentionally – to answer them. It unsettles and confuses, and yet at the same time is wrapped up within the dimensions of a fairly standard thriller novel. In Anton Chigurgh, McCarthy has created an interesting and complex character; something that is becoming a rare breed in modern fiction. It is a read in which the Worm has become fond of, and in which other readers should – at the very least – take a peek at.
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