In full disclosure, this review is partially adapted from an email conversation about this book. I read this book on the plane from Nairobi to Detroit way back in July, and it is amazing to me that I haven't posted about it yet. Note that there are spoilers in this review.
I saw the film first, and I adored it. Cormac McCarthy's dark, wiry novel is an animal that is at once alike and different than what I first saw on the screen, and to encounter it is singular and strange.
No Country for Old Men (2005) brings us to the bleary heat of the U.S. - Mexico border in 1980, where things are silent and on the brink. The title evokes W.B. Yeat's poem "Sailing to Byzantium," which goes like this:
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.
And so, as we meet Llewelyn Moss on a morning he hunts antelope near the Rio Grande, and then encounters the bloody aftermath of a botched heroin deal and a satchel filled with two million dollars (which Moss takes), there is this thick spectre of visions and bodies, artifice, "of what is past, or passing, or to come." Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the man trying to figure things out, the man who has been at the helm of this county for decades, watching the place he knows best spiraling out in strange and brutal ways. The omniscience of the story is broken up by Bell's first-person musings, set off in italics, on what he knows and what is beyond his reach. At the center is Anton Chigurh, a psychopath with an unnerving loyalty to a particular moral code. It is he who takes to hunting Moss. And it is the blunt juxtapositions of these men's different measures of honor that fuel this artful, linguistically exciting story.
One of the most interesting tensions in No Country for Old Men is the dissonance between its mythic overtures of place and creatures, of fortune (the luck kind) and fate, its mortal stakes ... and its insistence that what is unfolding is unprecedented, a signature of changing things, an uncertain future, a narrative that resists resolution. That is, for Bell, things are paced strangely; causes don't have the anticipated effects; he keeps arriving at scenes too late, after what has happened has happened; he isn't on the same clock as his world; he doesn't get to know for sure -- let alone intervene in -- much of what is unfolding. He tries to be an actor in the events; he is forced into the role of a discomfited witness. And the brilliant thing the author does is mimic Bell's experience in the experience of the reader. We creatures accustomed to certain kinds of narratives that give us certain kinds of signs and resolutions, a familiar flow of unfolding information -- we don't get that in this book. Like Bell, it puts us on edge. This is apparent in the text itself (outside of Bell's textual speeches): the text has a sort of blinking prose style that is at once blunt and hedging. The way that Moss' death is revealed is the most obvious example of this. We find out he's dead before we're quite sure the body is his. When it is first accounted for in the text, it is abrupt and offstage; the dead body doesn't yet have a name. He's dead before we get to see how he died, and we have about a third of the book to go -- now unmoored from the person we began the book with. This is weird.
Another reader suggested to me that the book relys on the idea (myth, let's say) of things being better, or at least simpler in the past -- an idea of "lost virtues" that is wrongminded and dangerous. I hear that in Bell's regretful rhetoric, which the book positions as the moral center of the novel. "Lost virtues" -- I hear sometimes that my generation 'will have to face big questions,' said in a way that implies that past generations (who grew up in the era of Vietnam and the atomic bomb and the Reformation) didn't face such questions. Different moral questions are not necessarily more difficult or more simple. Often they are not even that different. Believing otherwise is an opportunity for unlearning and simplistic blame.
I don't think I can write off the point that No Country for Old Men relies somewhat on this wrong-minded idea as part of its narrative truth. This is a great part of the novel's darkness, after all: a sense of entropy where the people we expect to intervene or interrupt the momentum in their various ways -- Moss, Bell, and a special agent hired into the case -- end up dead or done. All that's possible, it seems, is to adapt. Virtues and values become telescoped into the singular purpose of survival.
And yet.
Especially the final parts in Bell's narration bring altitude to this terrifying idea. Again, the most striking feature in the book to me is the narrative's refusal to resolve. This "singular purpose of survival" is too simple and neat a resolution to stand in this book. Bell's final narrations unravel what might've been a tightly wound little box. (It would be that tightly wound box if we removed Bell's first-person speeches; if the novel did all his scenes in the same third-person styles he does all the others.) This takes what's happening to him, his ethos, his work, his understanding of the world and his place in it, and pushes it beyond cause-effect and into multiplicity.
This is not my usual kind of book; I both love it and feel detached from it. I find it intriguing and provoking, and I'm impressed by the potency of this rather brief tale that beautifully merges language and story. Cormac McCarthy is also a brilliant writer of nature and landscape, not only observing it but communicating the moods and shades and textures of the places we move within. He relays nature's bigness in a way that is at once ominous, majestic, awe-inspiring, unnerving, and hopeful: that is, true.
At the same time, there is more reveling in bloodiness and violence than felt necessary for the purposeful discomfort of this stripped-down novel, which therefore gives the impression of being exploitative and melodramatic. (For example: the scene where we first meet Chigurh in the custody of a police officer.) Female characters, few that they are, are rather sentimentalized. There is a fixation on naming the firearm hardware that bows to distraction.
That said, I have thought of this book often and deeply over the last few months. It has stayed with me.
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