No Country for Old Men (Vintage International) Reviews

• 'It's A Mess, Aint It Sheriff?' '"

  
  By A1TPW86OHXTXFC on 2005-07-30
  'It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?' 'If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.' "Sheriff Bell's deputy says to him. And, yes, what a hell of a mess. 305 pages of a riveting book that I read in almost one sitting. I could not stop reading. The "old man" of the book if there is one, is Sheriff Bell. And his wife, Loretta, is the calming influence. Bell's voice is heard through out this book, in italicized version; we recognize that his down to earth common sense views are sure to calm down the violence that starts on page 4. The first murder, and then the second on page 5 and...
  
  The setting is Texas, and the title of the book may be a simile for what is happening in our world and in Texas. Llewellyn Moss, a young cowboy, who works hard for a living and is out hunting antelope, stumbles upon millions of dollars, drugs and 8 dead men in the Texas desert and highland. He does what many of us would do, he takes the money. He understands that his life will never be the same, but it is worth it, isn't it? Money is trouble and Moss is in for as much trouble as anyone could imagine. He has his wife move from their trailer to her mom's to keep her safe. And, Moss, well Moss goes looking for that trouble. And, Zagnorch? Well, find out for yourself.
  
  The character that I am intrigued with is Anton Chigurh. We meet him via a murder in which Chigurh goes from being handcuffed by a West Texas county deputy to driving away in his patrol car, splattered with blood. The telling of the murder is so gory, your heart stops but for a second. The heartlessness of Chigurh is burned into our memory, he will allow some of his victims to flip a coin for their life, but that is just as grizzly as the murders.
  
  The dignity and honor of Moss is contrasted with the heartlessness of Chigurh. We are rooting for Moss, and we understand this may be a little foolishness on our part. As Sheriff Bell says,the problems with our society now starts with the lack of manners. No one says, yes sir, anymore and it is all down hill from there. The lessons stated and learned in Cormac McCarthy's new book are many. We understand we are in the presence of a literary genius. Such a well written and played out novel.
  
  
  As Sheriff Bell states, "I think if you were Satan and you were settin' around tryin' to think up somethin' that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics." Money is the root of all evil. Millions of dollars may be equitable to evil, but wouldn't we all like to have a chance to experience it? Anton Chigurh may be likened to evil; will we look evil in the face again?
  Highly recommended.
  
  
  
  

• "Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction."

  
  By A319KYEIAZ3SON on 2005-07-19
  Cormac McCarthy's first novel since completing the Border Trilogy in 1998 is a dramatic change of pace. Gone is the focus on the wild Texas plains and the encroachment of civilization. Gone are the lyrical descriptions of untamed nature and young love. Gone is the belief that love and hope have a fighting chance in life's mythic struggles. Instead, we have a much darker, more pessimistic vision, set in Texas in the 1980s, a microcosm in which drugs and violence have so changed "civilization" that the local sheriff believes "we're looking at something we really aint even seen before."
  
  Forty-five-year-old Sheriff Ed Tom Bell must deal with the growing amorality affecting his small border town as a result of the drug trade. The old "rules" do not apply, and Bell faces a wave of violence involving at least ten murders. Running parallel with Bell's investigation of these murders is the story of Llewelyn Moss, a resident of Bell's town, who, while hunting in the countryside, has uncovered a bloody massacre and a truck containing a huge shipment of heroin. He has also discovered and stolen a case containing two million dollars of drug money, which results in his frantic run from hired hitmen. Hunting Moss is Anton Chigurh, a sociopathic cartel avenger, a Satan who will stop at nothing, the antithesis of the thoughtful and kindly Bell. A rival hitman named Wells is, in turn, stalking Chigurh.
  
  By far McCarthy's most exciting and suspenseful novel in recent years, the story speeds along, the body count rising in shocking scenes of depravity. Bell's first person musings about crime, society, and the people around him break the tension periodically, allowing the reader to ponder the wider implications of the action and to see it as a symbolic struggle for man's soul between good and evil, love and hate, God and Satan. As the violence continues and Bell becomes more discouraged, he visits his elderly Uncle Ellis, a former deputy sheriff and war veteran, and as they talk about World War I and the Vietnam War, where they were willing to give their lives for a presumably winnable cause, the contrast between those battles and this battle on the home front is seen in broader and bleaker perspective.
  
  McCarthy's desire to preserve traditional values, and his grim vision of the present and future, reflect a view of life that many readers will not share. The artistry the reader has seen in McCarthy's thematic development throughout the rest of the novel is sacrificed in the last forty pages, in which Bell's overt warnings and cautionary remarks about the future sound preachy. Still, the novel is breathtaking in its construction, and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is one of McCarthy's best-drawn characters. (4.5 stars) n Mary Whipple
  
  
  

• Old Man Takes A Look At This Life

  
  By A34AI5SM741RNY on 2005-07-31
  Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian holds a prominent place in my pantheon of great American novels. If only for that book, its author has earned his seat at the same table with Melville, Hemingway, and Dostoevsky. I guess that makes me one of those people who had high hopes for No Country For Old Men. What insights has McCarthy to offer after twenty-years of pondering Blood Meridian's realization that everything, no matter how barbarous, is permitted to man?
  
  The answers he gives here are as shriveled as the human ears Blood Meridian's Glanton Gang strung into necklaces and wore on their rampages. Sheriff Bell is No Country's sole attempt at rendering a human character. McCarthy's modern version of Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, is a killer apparently unworthy of physical description. As for motivation, Chigurh considers himself an agent of fate. He might as well be the man with the pneumatic bolt gun in a literal slaughterhouse. He kills because that's what he does. No Country's other characters seem to have nothing better to do than file meekly into the abattoir and die gooey but strangely tidy deaths. They aren't cattle, though. Dead cattle are reborn as beef and wallets. McCarthy wads his characters up and tosses them into the trash.
  
  Heretofore, he described landscape, scene, and butchery in terms that bespoke intimate relations with them. No Country doesn't give a damn. Here's a sketch of a motel room. "Old fashioned pushbutton switchplate. Oak furniture from the turn of the century. Brown walls. Same chenille bedspread."
  
  Ditto for plot continuity. It matters not that the plot, such as it is, is beset by random interventions. After all, as McCarthy has his protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, say (shortly before becoming a victim of unforeseeable circumstance), "The point is there aint no point."
  
  No Country's attempts to dig deeper are few and feeble. Chigurh gets off a few banalities about the inevitability of fate. Sheriff Bell throws down with some dusty observations that might still earn a beer or two in a West Texas bar. But if any sheriff in Texas actually speaks with the grade school dropout English McCarthy puts in Bell's mouth, there's a job in Washington waiting for him in 2008.
  
  With the exception of this possible dialect failure ---and I don't live in Texas so I don't know---I can't fault the writing. It is relentless in communicating disconnection, lack of meaning, and futility. At the end of No Country, we're left to abandon the struggle with Sheriff Bell and walk away diminished, welcome to extract what fleeting pleasures we may from the insignificance of our private lives.
  
  McCarthy may have become the Old Man of whom he writes. I hope not. I wish him better than this ignominious end.
  
  
  

• Holy Cats!

  
  By A359U0JFFZ0Q04 on 2005-08-10
  If you like your conflicts fully resolved, you may want to look elsewhere; if you're bothered by unconventional punctuation, you may be irritated by this book; if you despise jump cuts and point of view shifts, you may find yourself rereading sections of this book to catch your bearings. Otherwise, however, you may find this one of the most original books you've read in years.
  
  The story begins when Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a drug shootout while out antelope hunting. He follows a trail out into the desert at the end of which he finds a dead man and 2.4 million dollars. What he doesn't find (until it's too late) is the bug hidden in the money. Soon he has a dauntless hit man on his tail. The bodies pile up like cord wood. This part of the story is pretty conventional. Llewelyn Moss is likable and smart. He seems to anticipate the killer's every move, until he meets a fourteen-year-old, female hitchhiker, who proves to be too much of a distraction.
  
  About two-thirds of the way through the book, the focus switches from Llewelyn to Sheriff Bell, who's trying to save Llewelyn from himself. There's more quirky point of view stuff going on here as McCarthy has Bell tell us what he's thinking in first person, then switches immediately to third, still using Bell as a focus. Bell philosophizes about how he's never seen criminals quite as bad as these drug pushers. He never really believed in Satan until confronted with these people. McCarthy does like to preach occasionally and Bell is a willing stand-in; he indicts not only the drug pushers, but also the people who buy them, and he also seems to hint at some kind of organized crime syndicate that is intentionally chipping away at the American character, hence the title NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.
  
  I have to admit that I was completely caught off guard by what happened to Llewelyn Moss. It happens after a jump cut, and I kept thinking McCarthy was playing some kind of trick on the reader. No such luck. McCarthy is just as ruthless as Chigurh, the hit man. And there's another surprise in story when it comes time to resolve Sheriff Bell's story arc. You won't believe that one either.
  
  

• No wonder his wife is friendly with the prisoners

  
  By A2KH4JSEJ4FE6C on 2006-11-09
  This is the story of Sheriff Bell, an insufferable dullard who won't shut up about how criminals these days are really evil (as opposed to all the lovely ones he knew of when growing up?).
  
  He's also a world-class boaster, never going more than a few pages without telling us how fantastic is wife Loretta is. The same Loretta who spends most of her time baking for or writing to evil criminals -- which tells me all I need to know about that marriage.
  
  The yakkity-yakking doesn't stop there. An even bigger gas-bag is Chigurh, the motor-mouthed murderer. In fact, he kills people twice. Before he shoots 'em, he bores 'em to death. His weapon of choice: Lectures about coins. (His final kill took so long, I had to restrain myself from flingling the book across the train carriage.)
  
  On the technical front, McCarthy does not structure the drama in the Classical way. He chose the Boring way. The majority of scenes end exactly as you expect and only one character (Moss) has a believable goal. McCarthy also omits the obligatory final scene, between Chigurh and his prey Moss, which was the only reason I kept reading the book. No doubt this is to defy the expectations of the reader. Expectations that this might turn out to be a decent story, in my case.
  
  What's more, Sheriff Bell has no scenes with either Chigurh or Moss, making him a narrator with zero personal stake in the action. Because McCarthy writes good, visual dialogue, he gets away with an inconsequntial narrator for the first half of the story. But when the man on the run (Moss) exits the story, there is no other character to invest in, so the plot grinds to a halt. McCarthy cannot resusitate it because there is no connection whatever between the two remaining main players.
  
  So, does McCarthy put us out of our misery? No. Sheriff Bell waffles on for pages and pages about Vietnam, not unlike John Goodman's character Walter in the Big Lebowski. And that's it.
  
  My verdict: I hope Loretta runs away with a criminal. Preferably one of them new evil ones.
  
  
• What happened?
  By A1WO2NG5URXP7N on 2005-10-09
  OK, who kidnapped Cormac McCarthy and then submitted a manuscript apparently written by George W. Bush in his name? This is the most disappointed I have ever been with a book. Up til now, Cormac McCarthy was one of my favorite writers. All the Pretty Horses is the best coming of age story I have ever read.
  
  This book does not seem like it was written by the same person. Chigurh is just plain evil. He is a one-dmensional villian straight out of a Steven Segal movie. Virtually all Mexicans are 1-D lawless thugs.
  
  The sheriff's wife is just plain good. The sheriff is at least 99% just plain good, but can't forgive himself for the one time in his life where he might have been 1% bad. The syrupy descriptions of their marriage were nauseatingly simplistic. Who really acts like that?
  
  Much of the first two thirds of the book was focused on a character named Moss who had an irritating habit of never directly answering a question, even when doing so would make him and the person he was with significantly less likely to be brutally murdered. Which of course does happen, but inexplicably it happens "offscreen" as another disgusted reviewer wrote.
  
  One character states this and we are meant to nod our heads solemnly: The problem with the Vietnam war was that the boys did not take Jesus with them over there. Seriously, ink and paper that I ended up paying for were used to make this inane statement.
  
  There was no subtle symbolism in this book as is found in many of his other books. Eavangelical christianity is stuffed down the readers throat with a Texas-sized red-hot poker.
  
  I will probably never buy another Cormac McCarthy book. I guess I could see it coming with Cities of the Plain which was also not very good, but at least it did not make me angry.
  
  Do not waste your money on this book. Watch reruns of George W. Bush saying that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher or talking about the Butcher of Baghdad and you will get the idea.
  
  
• Another great one from the master
  By A3006WHOAYJRLI on 2005-09-23
  The bell hanging on the rope jangled and the glass door banged shut. The three browsing patrons looked up and went back to their books. He pulled his hat off and holding it in front of him walked over to the desk and stood.
  You looking for somethin?
  This a bookstore aint it.
  Yeah, it sayin bookstore on the sign I reckon it jus might be one a them.
  I'd kindly like a book then.
  Don't say.
  Yes I do.
  No, you don't is why I said that.
  I kindly beggin your pardon but I do.
  Well then. Sometimes when a man says he's lookin for a book sometimes he don't know but he might be lookin for something else. Sometimes when he says he's lookin for a book it might be that the book is lookin for him. Sometimes it might be that he and the book are lookin for somethin else entirely.
  Don't say.
  I kindly do say.
  He glanced over out the window and the sun was shining on the steepletop like birth itself on the morning the lord took his first breath when all the world was new like breath from a mare's nostrils at twenty below.
  If I was lookin for something else I kindly think I'd of knowed it.
  That may be.
  It may.
  It may not.
  Then if you'll kindly excuse me I'll be goin across the street to the other bookstore now.
  Now hold on there friend I was just raggin you.
  And then he shot him.
  
  
• The master best novel yet!
  By A19EWYR4T91RCQ on 2005-08-08
  I have read the "Border Trilogy," and "All the Pretty Horses" was my favorite, especially the horse breaking scenes and the scenes set in the Mexican Prison. BUT a lot of the time McCarthy leaves me scratching my head. Sometimes his stories go wandering off on tangents I just don't get (I sometimes fear I am just not intelligent enough to understand his point). This book however is more direct and simply laid out. A kind of modern day thriller that has so much more going on.
  
  The basic story is this: While out hunting along the Rio Grande river, Llewelyn Moss, a Texas welder, stumbles upon $2 million, and a bunch of herion ready for the street all guarded by a dead man. Ross takes the money and is soon on the run from drug dealers, assassins, and the law. The author uses the plot as way to explore good and evil, heaven and hell, right and wrong; and do these things even exist?
  
  The book also contains plenty of action and some very gory, brutal scenes, so if you are bothered by graphic violence be forwarned! The Violence, though is central to the story and the issues the author is exploring.
  
  To sum up this is an excellent thriller read with a lot more to say, than just entertain.
  
  
• Weak Effort by a (formerly) Great Writer...
  By A36Q1X321C4VGI on 2005-10-25
  Mccarthy lost it some while back. This book starts off like a cheap James Patterson thriller complete with super-nefarious villian wielding a cattle stun-gun to punch office-perfect perforations into his victim's head, when a .38 would have been just as effective and a lot less wieldy. Despite this (and the fact that Chigurh was a major departure from one of the most completely-drawn embodiments of evil in a literary character: the Judge from Blood Meridian) the cat-and-mouse between he and Moss does keep the pages turning. I assumed Mccarthy was trying to tighten up his storylines and the book maintained its edge until about three-quarters of the way through, when the entire plot was abandoned, the protagonist is killed in a gunfight that is mentioned in passing, and the reader is left to switch gears: Ah, maybe the sheriff is the true hero of this story, and he will succeed where Moss failed because he is the more virtuous...
  
  Nope. The sheriff up and retires. He RETIRES. And the book is over.
  
  I kept returning to an old tape of Garrison Keillor's I used to own. In it, the title character writes western cliff-hangers that are terse and thrilling, but he suffers from a strange type of writer's block whereby every time the hero is hanging onto the edge of a cliff by his fingernails, the rattlers are nipping at his hands and the indians are firing arrows at him from below, he inexplicably would jump to the next chapter where all the boys would go shopping for bunk beds...
  
  Mccarthy went shopping for bunk beds. The meds wore off. I don't know. Save yourself the time and expense. Buy Harry Potter or something with some sex in it...
  
  
• Godawful at best
  By A3JPPR6JT75N0E on 2008-02-25
  This seemed like the perfect book for me. I'm past fifty (old man) and not only have I grown up in West Texas, but I own land in the very area this story takes place. Unfortunately this familiarity with the subject matter is a large part of what made this story suck so badly. So many details strain credulity. No one could be out in that land without water on them if they are walking a distance. No one has a rifle capable of hitting a bullseye at 1200 yards unless the rifle weighs at least 24lbs. and has at least a 24X scope on it (and are one of the top 3 marksmen in the world!) and no one could find anyone running for the Rio Grande (itself incredibly unlikely) at night in that part of Texas. Don't even get started on his hike on the Mexican side from those parched canyonlands to Acuna-totally unbelievable in the time alotted. Then there's McCarthy's relentless repetition of particular words like "glassing" the landscape and the incessant driving into and out of the "caldera". Just what the hell is a caldera? I had to look it up. Shows you it ain't a word anybody ever heard anyone in three generations of West Texans ever use. Then there's the spectacular flaw of the Sheriff stopping his vehicle on the Amistad bridge on HWY 90 to ponder the situation. Only one problem, that bridge is two-lane with nowhere to pull over. If he stopped there, most likely an eighteen-wheeler would have plowed into him. McCarthy's almost complete disregard for accuracy in the specific setting he has chosen baffles me. I admit, good storytelling can overcome glaring mistakes, but No Country comes up short in that department also. It could have just been called "Oh, Those Kids Today!" the way it incessantly goes on about these young-uns today and how bad their behavior is. The Sheriff's inner monologue was like sitting in on a Middle-School teacher's lounge and listening to them complain about the kids in class. It got so bad, I just skimmed about the last 20 pages and by the end, realized I hadn't missed anything.
  
  
• This is crap
  By A2TFII31L72CW9 on 2005-12-31
  I really want to read a book which kills off all of the characters, except for the really evil guy who, after killing everyone in sight, returns the big money to some syndicate guy who hasn't even been in the story, like some honorable mercenary. Thanks also for making sure the one guy who does survive (the sheriff who doesn't have any impact on the story besides talking to people) has a deep secret which goes unresolved. Total crap and a waste of money; if the author showed up on my doorstep I would not only my money back, but bill him for my time.
  
  
• no country for anyone but old men
  By A22EBLAXSCLORX on 2005-10-05
  Cormac Mccarthy is the most regional of writers. He is geographically regional, culturally regional, sexually regional, racial regional and even possibly politically regional. Unless you are a white, male, heterosexual, southwestern republican it is unlikely you will connect.
  According to Mccarthy there is little value for men in talk and typically male dialogue goes something like this: "You ever bin east 'a Waco"; "Nope. You?"; "Yep he said and spat" (spitting is common and seems to serve as a puncutation for the absolute distain with which the spitter holds speech communication.) The words don't convey ideas but the idea of an idea- communication is futile when measured against the "BIG" issue of life. Men don't talk, at least not sensibly (women do and that is why they are not as good as men.)
  The next thing it is important to understand about Mccarthy is that there are two periods in American history- before the sixties and after the sixties (although this is a little too simple since the real watershed began earlier, probably in the early part of the 20th century- the sixties just put paid to the classic American period.) Now the result of there being two periods is not as important as it might seem. The difference is that in the first period a man was going to be cut off at the knees by some event of random malevalent chance that he will not understand and in the second period he will be cut off at the knees by some event of non-random malevalent intention that he will not understand. This is the "BIG" idea of life; it is okay to be killed by the unknowable forces of hostile nature but not as all right to be killed by evil all-powerful people who will destroy honest "real" men for their dishonest purposes.
  No Country For Old Men is set in the second period and to make his point clear Mccarthy has not allowed the slightest semblance of subtlety to interfere. He has anthropomorphicized intentional malevalence and to make it even more clear to the idiot reader has the character kill victims with a pneumatic gun used to kill cattle in a abattoir. This should leave no doubt that the victim is the hapless pawn of fate- a steer killed at slaughter.
  The novel is structured with chapters of plot (such as it is and it is quite simple- a self-reliant "real" man happens on a scene of human carnage while intending to inflict a little carnage of his own on the local animal population. He finds a bag of money from a drug deal gone wrong and keeps it, then, and this isn't quite credible, he returns all the way back to this remote place in the middle of the night because one of the dying men asked him for water- 12 hours later he shows up, feeling guilty I suppose, with a drink for this long dead hombre and of course is discovered and the rest of the story is the arc his fate takes to its final, inevitable end of being cut off at the knees) and little italicized chapters whereby the local sheriff investigating this whole affair bestows his wisdom on the reader(if you survive long enough before being cut off at the knees you earn the right to talk even though you say mostly that you don't understand any of what is happpening- to understand would mean that your heart is not pure since you have some knowledge of the malevalent force.) This wisdom then is confined to "the world has changed and where once a man could count on being done in by incomprehensible random malevalence now a man will be done by incomprehensible intentional malevalence" and this is the most awful change to be imagined.
  To say that Cormac Mccarthy is irrelevant to American literature is probably giving him too much credit. This is stuff for a very select audience of "real men" affectionados.
  
  
• A difficult book to read, but excellent story nonetheless
  By AX54G5AL870Q8 on 2007-12-31
  NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy
  December 31, 2007
  
  Rating *** (3 Stars)
  
  I think many others have probably given this book a 5 star rating. The reason for my 3 star rating is this - I had a really hard time following the story line. With hardly any distinctive quotation marks and punctuation, I couldn't tell right away who the narrator was for each chapter until half way through each one. There were no quotation marks, so at first I didn't know where dialog began or ended. I know this is an artistic style of writing, but personally I have a hard time following it.
  
  And my apologies again to all those who raved about this book, because the story was fantastic. What helped me a lot was watching the movie a few days after finishing the book, and it helped put the chapters together for me. As I watched the movie, I saw that the script followed almost to a tee the original book, including a lot of the dialog. This is the type of book that I think one needs to read more than once to really appreciate it. I do recommend the book to those who are true book fans, and who can appreciate a different style of writing.
  
  With all that said, here's a short summary of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: Chigurh is a loner, a man that has only one business in mind - killing. Moss is a man that happens to come upon a stash of money in the millions, and while he is perfectly aware that there must be someone out there looking for it, he doesn't immediately know that one of the many who want that money back is Chigurh. Moss also is about to find out how good Chigurh is when it comes to getting what he wants, and getting rid of people who get in his way or detract him from a job well done. There is also the sheriff who knows Moss is on the run, and that Chigurh is on Moss's trail. It's a race against time as the sheriff tries to prevent another killing.
  
  This is one very violent story, and while I said I had a difficult time with the writing style, it is still a very good tale and one that I will not forget for many years to come. One thing that stands out is the highly descriptive writing. One can picture in detail every thing that is happening. I suggest that all who read this book watch the movie as well, because both complement each other. I rarely will watch a movie and read a book that the movie was based on, mainly because it's rare to find a movie turn out as good as the original book. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is an exception.
  
  
• No Country For Ignorant Cowardly Old Men
  By A1F8XLQ7ZRY5Q4 on 2007-11-07
  I have read eight Cormac McCarthy books, loved six, liked one and now, hated one. While the prose is as excellent as any McCarthy novel, the message is absurd. The books main character waxes about the good old days like the thirties (The Great Depression when kids starved to death and died of minor infections when they weren't being exploited by filth spewing industry, the birth of European fascism), and the forties (Atomic Bomb or Holocaust anyone?)while ducking confrontation due to his life preserving repeated cowardice.
  
  It is sad that such a compelling and scary character as Anton Chigurh is lost in this mind numbing preach fest.
  
  Sheriff Bell gets most of the pages with his non stop whining and common sense sans information talk of the fall of mankind. The message that the character redundantly babbles about is that society is going the wrong direction cus we aint darned redneck enough. Sheriff Bell is plenty redneck, and like most rednecks he's scared of a greater world that he knows little about and has no concept that human history has few if any eras less dangerous than today. Sheriff Bell has no problem preaching with moral superiority while letting a truck load of armed menacing thugs roll away through the night to be somebody else's problem. He, as a lawman, is worthless.
  
  Maybe McCarthy is trying to make a point by destroying the archetype of the greatest generations small town sheriff. Maybe he is trying to tell the reader that this is no country for ignorant cowardly old men because they are not of much use. If he is, I am pretty sure most readers are not noticing.
  
  
• McCarthy's latest: something old, something new, minimalist, scientific
  By A2VHYWHUYGWAEZ on 2005-12-04
  1980--Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope in a desert near the Texas-Mexico border--he finds dead Mexicans---heroin---millions in cash---drug deal gone bad. Moss takes off with the loot. Drug lords declare war on each other. Their lackeys chase Moss. So does Anton Chigurh, a killing machine/psychopath. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tries to find Moss before Chigurh does. Bullets fly--blood splatters--bodies pile up. Lawmen can't stop the crooks or carnage. Sheriff Bell suffers weltschmerz, takes refuge in personal verities.
  
  On one level, No Country for Old Men is a page-turning potboiler of a crime novel with fast action, explosive scenes and sparse narration--not what we have come to expect from Cormac McCarthy. The author still has a keen ear for Southern vernacular. But terse, bluff talk often goes on for pages without narrative frames. Lacking in this novel are the transcendent authorial voice, lyrical prose, and profound descriptions of nature that have brought McCarthy great acclaim in this country and abroad.
  
  Still, there's much to praise here. Sheriff Bell functions as narrator, protagonist, penitent, and homespun sage. He's a good old boy type who seems even older than his 57 years. In thirteen italicized monologues, each beginning a chapter of the novel, Bell reflects on his life and the world. He's haunted by an act in World War II which he thinks is failure of duty and courage. He believes his long police service has been a second chance to make good protecting his small town and atoning for his failings. He sees a decline in good manners everywhere and narrowly interprets it as the sign of the end time of rampant drugs and horrible crimes: "Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam, the end is pretty much in sight." (1)
  
  For Bell as narrator and protagonist, Chigurh (pronounced "sugar") is stark proof that America is going to hell in a hand basket, no place for old men. Though he pursues Chigurh, Bell suggests that it's not going to be a successful chase: "Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him." Bell has no physical fear of any villain: "I always knew you had to be willin to die to even do this job." But the simple lawman knows the spiritual risk of confronting the complex psychopath: "I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would."
  
  Chigurh is arguably one of the most bizarre characters in any American art, as strange and terrifying as Hannibal Lecter in the film Silence of the Lambs. Chigurh's eyes are "[b]lue as lapis. At once glistening and totally opaque. Like wet stones." He's a master of firearms, a murderous houdini with his body. While handcuffed he strangles a deputy sheriff. He's especially fond of a cattle gun that he straps to his back and uses with deadly force:
  
  "He placed his hand on the man's head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. 'I just didn't want you to get blood on the car,' he said."
  
  A hit man, who used to work with Chigurh, puts his fellow assassin's character in chilling perspective:
  
  "You cant make a deal with him....Even if you gave him the money he'd still kill you. There's no one alive on this planet that's ever had even a cross word with him. They're all dead....You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that."
  
  Among McCarthy's villains Chigurh is not entirely unique. Eduardo, the cocky pander in Cities of the Plain, shows Chigurh-like traits in his climactic knife fight with John Cole over the epileptic prostitute Magdalena. As he and hero Cole circle and slash, Eduardo derides Cole as a gringo type the pimp despises:
  
  "In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him. Whores. Superstition. Finally death. For that is what has brought you here...and what will always bring you here. Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one."
  
  Similarly, Chigurh taunts Carla Jean, Moss' wife:
  
  "When I came into your life your life was over. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?"
  
  Chigurh recalls Judge Holden, the intellectual monster of Blood Meridian. Both smack of Nietzsche, a little of the sane philosopher, but more of the mad man who might have blathered his will to power like a loony Zarathustra.
  
  Huge and hairless, the seven-foot Holden is the brains of a motley bunch of cutthroats hired by Mexican officials to kill Indians for gold. He loves to lecture his ignorant cohorts:
  
  "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent....The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear....But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate....The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."
  
  Near the end of the novel Holden lectures the Kid, the mostly violent unnamed character whose bit of decency Holden sees as betrayal of the judge's code of war:
  
  "A man seeks his own destiny and no other....Will or nil....Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last it speaks to his inmost heart only that man can dance [the ritual of the true warrior]...."
  
  Far less verbose than Holden, Chigurh in his perverse superiority is just as power mad as the judge. Before he kills one victim, Chigurh portrays himself as a daring risk taker, "I let him [deputy sheriff] take me into town in handcuffs. I'm not sure why I did this but I think I wanted to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will. Because I believe that one can. That such a thing is possible."
  
  To a kingpin concerned about more threats to his drug empire, Chigurh boasts, "You don't have to worry. Nobody else is coming...I'm in charge of who is coming and who is not....I have no enemies. I don't permit such a thing."
  
  Holden is a mock renaissance man skilled in war, science, law, letters, dance, rhetoric, and etiquette. He roams a nineteenth-century Western wasteland like an uncanny ubermensch. Seemingly an easy target for bloody enemies but unscathed by them, the judge kills the innocent and the guilty. He suppresses incipient rebellion, defeats all adversaries. He's Satan without the wrath of God, Ahab without gloom and doom, Macbeth without fear and guilt, Lear without heart and soul. His fool is a poor idiot he rescues from filth and feces, keeps on a leash, and trains to have dog-like devotion to Holden alone.
  
  In contrast, Chigurh is a lone wolf who stalks and kills in a twilight world of shifting values, declining law, and rampant crime. He's all the more terrifying because he seems to exist without origin or background, a wicked paradox, bland and mostly nondescript yet bold and intimidating.
  "[T]here wasn't nothing unusual about him," says a boy who had a brief encounter with the villain. "But he didn't look like anybody you'd want to mess with. When he said somethin you damn sure listened."
  
  Heretofore McCarthy's fictional world has shown marked literary influences: Faulkner, the Bible, Melville, Shakespeare, Dante, and perhaps other greats. The new novel, however, may be the start of a different direction for the author, one that draws less on literature and more on his wide reading in physics and the philosophy of mathematics and on his close association with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, a leading think tank.
  
  (2)For the last four years McCarthy has had an office at SFI. He's the lone fiction writer there, unsalaried, a maverick without a computer. He told a recent interviewer, "I have only two responsibilities, to eat lunch and attend afternoon tea." On most days, even on weekends, when he's not tapping away in his office on an Olivetti portable typewriter, he's engaged in discussions with scientists about their specialties. If asked, he often looks over their texts before publication and gives insightful comments. His friends include Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize winner in physics; Geoffrey West, the British physicist turned biologist and the institute's interim president; and Sergei Starostin, the Russian linguist.
  
  "I find it easier to talk to Cormac about what J. Doyne Farmer is doing than to talk to Doyne himself," said Starostin. Farmer is McKinsey Research Professor at S.F.I. and the economist-physicist-gambler celebrated in Thomas Bass's best-selling book The Endaemonic Pie. He is perhaps best known as one of the founding fathers of what has come to be called Chaos Theory. He has also made important theoretical contributions to problems in complex systems, including machine learning and the origin of life.
  
  What is Chaos Theory and how might it relate to No Country for Old Men?
  
  The least arcane explanation of Chaos that I've found is in "Chaos Theory and Fractals," an article by Jonathan Mendelson and Elana Blumenthal,[...] , parts of which follow:
  
  
  "Chaos theory describes complex motion and the dynamics of sensitive systems. Chaotic systems are mathematically deterministic but nearly impossible to predict....Behavior in chaotic systems is aperiodic....[N]o variable describing the state of the system undergoes a regular repetition of values. A chaotic system can actually evolve in a way that appears to be smooth and ordered....The weather is an example of a chaotic system....The presence of chaotic systems in nature seems to place a limit on our ability to apply deterministic physical laws to predict motions with any degree of certainty....A war is another type of chaotic system...."
  
  The authors go on to relate Chaos to Complexity. Interestingly, the Santa Fe Institute has been in the forefront of complexity research for decades.
  
  "Equilibrium is very rare, and the more complex a system is, there are more disturbances that can threaten stability....A complex system is neither completely deterministic nor completely random and it exhibits both characteristics. The causes and effects of events that a complex system experiences are not proportional to each other....Complexity can also be called the "edge of chaos." When a complex dynamical chaotic system becomes unstable, an attractor draws the stress and the system splits....In daily life we see complexity in traffic flow, weather changes, population changes, organizational behavior, shifts in public opinion, urban development, and epidemics."
  
  Two drug factions---one American, the other Mexican---operate in No Country for Old Men. In microcosm each suggests characteristics of the worldwide criminal drug trade, a complex dynamical chaotic system skilled in logistics and economics, driven by addiction and greed, given to volatility and death. To its producers and distributors the system appears smooth and ordered when they make and market loads of drugs, thwart the law, and reap huge profits. To its consumers the system works well when they have ready access to suppliers, avoid arrest, and feed their addiction.
  
  The novel begins with evidence of an unstable system: several murders, undelivered heroin, and $2.4 million in a case beside a dead man. Enter an attractor, Llewelyn Moss, basically a decent man who can't resist the temptation to take the money. In their desperate efforts to escape and begin a new life, Moss and his wife draw stress from the system, Chigurh, and the law. Chigurh also functions as an attractor, a psychopathic freelancer, both stressor and stressed, accountable to nothing except his own insane "principles." All these elements, then, cause the system to split resulting in an epidemic of murder and mayhem along the Texas-Mexico border.
  
  Chigurh thinks and acts like a complex system with both deterministic and random characteristics. He likes to play a coin-tossing game of probability to determine a victim's life or death. He randomly picks a filling station manager, intimidates the man into playing the game. "I don't know what it is I stand to win," the man says. "You stand to win everything," Chigurh says. Confused, nervous, eager to get away from the bizarre challenger, the man calls the toss and wins. Later, Chigurh rejects Carla Jean Moss's argument for life but offers her a chance to live on the flip of his coin. She loses. He explains her loss deterministically:
  
  "Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this...I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding....A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your life was visible from the beginning."
  
  Chigurh moves and murders in dynamic, aperiodic ways. He constantly changes places and vehicles, destroys property, burns evidence. Some people he kills on principle, some for business, others at random. Thus he baffles and discourages Sheriff Bell and his fellow lawmen whose experience has largely been that of breaking up fist fights and catching predictable crooks. I doubt if a keen detective like Auguste Dupin, who solves the mystery in Poe's "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," could deal with a posthuman predator like Chigurh.
  
  As for the criminal drug trade, it's no doubt flourished so long because so many people (for simple or complex reasons) choose to live artificially through chemistry. Then, too, justice systems often deal with the problem the way McIntyre does in this novel. With his clipboard, officious manner, obvious questions and simplistic notes, the DEA agent irritates the common sense of Sheriff Bell and his deputies. McIntyre suggests linear thinking and narrow approaches to solving crime, woefully ineffective in an age of chaos and complexity.
  
  The staggering problems of our age call for new ideas to solve them. Perhaps they can be found in thinking places like the Santa Fe Institute and in the sights and insights of writers like Cormac McCarthy.
  
  I've gone on pretty long about this novel because I think it offers readers far more than its negative critics (3) have found. I don't believe I've given away too much. What happens to Moss, Sheriff Bell and Chigurh? Please read the book and find out. I can't resist a hint, though: goodness retreats; evil gets a setback. The stage is set for a sequel. It will be interesting to see if it develops like No Country for Old Men. For here we see a new McCarthy who minimally and skillfully combines horror, humor and sentiment. Then as the story closes he sounds strong notes of affirmation. Horror I've illustrated enough. Here are examples of the other elements:
  
  Humor (Bell's deputy and the sheriff at the first crime scene):
  
  "It's a mess, aint it, Sheriff."
  
  "If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here."
  
  Sentiment (Bell on his wife of 31 years):
  
  "I'll wake Loretta up just bein awake myself. Be layin there and she'll say my name. Like askin me if I'm there. Sometimes I'll go in the kitchen and get her a ginger ale and we'll set there in the dark."
  
  Affirmation (Bell recalling a trough he saw in wartime Europe and the man who created it):
  
  "I thought about it after I left there with that house blown to pieces. I'm goin to say that water trough is there yet. It would have took somethin to move it....I think about him settin there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just a hour or two after supper....And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all."
  
  This passage may represent McCarthy's appreciation of the value and potential of art, his promise to work long and hard at his craft, and his hope of creating a body of work worthy of his readers and posterity. He has already given us a rich legacy of literature. May it continue to grow.
  
  NOTES
  
  (1) McCarthy dislikes commas, uses few apostrophes and no quotation marks. For my own clarity and for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with his work, I quote examples of his dialogue and omniscient narration.
  
  (2) My information in this paragraph and the next one comes from Richard B. Woodward, "Cormac Country," Vanity Fair, August 2005. This article grew out of the Woodward-McCarthy interview, only the second interview the novelist has granted.
  
  (3) McCarthy has more than a few influential detractors, among them Michiko Kakutani and Walter Kirn of the New York Times and William Deresiewicz of The Nation. While these three show some insight into McCarthy's work, they do so in slick, grudging ways. Particularly irritating is Deresiewicz's prejudicial remark (in his review of the new novel) about McCarthy's age and old men in general.
  
  
  
  
• Great writing, horrible book
  By A5BAVYXHYG0QE on 2007-10-31
  SPOILER ALERT
  
  First off, it is quite obvious that Cormac McCarthy has the skill to write remarkably well. Even in the half-sentences and heavy-handed stylization of this novel's writing, his skill shows through.
  
  When I strip away all the non-traditional storytelling and artifice, it really seems to boil down to an extremely violent crime novel/morality tale. The plot is even a bit more streamlined and simplistic than most crime/detective novels. There is a lot of emphasis on descriptions of weapons and cars and desert scenery, but most of the characters are barely sketched in.
  
  It seems to me the novel is telling us "evil" wins, we have to give up, and the world is getting continually worse. While it is telling us this, it wallows in the Grand Guignol voyeurism of ultra-violence and fear. It eats its cake and has it too... kind of hypocritical to me. And then, the only character in the novel who is depicted with any integrity is the crazy violent cold-blooded killer. WTF?
  
  Not only do I disagree vehemently with this message, I don't see the moral difference between the message of this novel, and George W. Bush's constant message of "be afraid be afraid be afraid."
  
  I find this book morally and spiritually repugnant.
  
  
• The Lone Gunman
  By A3M96ZU9VU441F on 2005-07-20
  Unlike other reviews I'll stick to the review itself and not the retelling of the inner notes of the publisher. This is McCarthy's first true crime noir thriller and what a thrill it is. The story though simple in plot is never dull and the characters as usual for McCarthy find themselves over their head very quickly (with the exception of Chigurh). Only sheriff Bell (a.k.a. Lord Jim) seems to realize this, but even he cannot alter the path life has set for himself. The dialog that has made McCarthy famous is as strong as ever, and as sparse. The writing is sparse and one notices immediately that the author has purposely left out much of the atmospheric narrative that is found is all of his earlier novels. Chigurh is by far one of the strongest and most interesting characters McCarthy has ever created. And as usual the one we learn least about. But all the reader need know of this guy is found in the first chapter.
  
  This is a quick read. Fans of McCarthy will notice that the narrative diction is well pruned and reminiscent of Hemingway in comparison to his earlier works, so you can leave the dictionary on the shelf.
  
  Finally, The New Yorker and the New York Times took this opportunity to trash not only No Country for Old Men, but McCarthy's overall canon. One complaint they had was that he is too violent, too theatrical, too melodramatic, and there aren't enough well-developed female characters. Not just in this novel but all of his novels. I wonder if they are at all familiar with the reality of the eras and the environments that McCarthy writes about. McCarthy has demythified the old west. And it is well over due. I also read where these two publishers enjoyed Harry Potter. Well. I suppose a balanced novel of character genders is more important than structured plot, narrative, and overall literary value. What do I know. I'm just a simple reader.
  
  
• No Book for Discerning Readers
  By A2JSXEPMAKU4U6 on 2005-10-17
  No Country for Old Men begins promisingly enough. After a brief rumination about sending a killer to death row by Sheriff Bell, one of the novel's main characters, we meet Chigurh-a stone killer who proceeds to dispatch (while wearing handcuffs, no less) first the deputy who has arrested him and then an unlucky motorist whose car he subsequently absconds with. The two killings are bloody and brutal and readers are surely in store for a modern-day shoot-`em-up with a literary flair. It is Cormac McCarthy, after all.
  
  We then meet another character, one Llewelyn Moss, who happens upon a drug deal gone bad. Along with some dead bodies (and one live one), Moss finds a truckload of heroin and a satchel containing several million dollars. He takes the money, heads home, hides it under a bed, and then returns to the area about twelve hours later with a jug of water because he feels guilty about abandoning a thirsty drug dealer. Of course, he runs into the owners of the money, they give chase, and the game is afoot.
  
  Chigurh is hot on Moss's trail, leaving numerous dead bodies in his wake. Sheriff Bell is after the drug dealers and tries to save Moss from the deadly clutches of the bad guys (including Chigurh) after him. Moss gets shot. Chigurh gets a load of buckshot in his leg. There's a bloody shootout involving Chigurh and numerous bad guys. In the midst of all this mayhem, the narrative is interrupted every so often by Sheriff Bell who muses about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket and spouts various bromides and a lot of homespun philosophy.
  
  The problems with this book are the lack of cohesion in the story, a less than satisfying ending, and especially the dialogue. Chigurh insists on explaining to two of his victims his rationale as to why it's necessary for him to blow their brains out. Rather than appearing profound, he sounds like a bloviating lunatic (which, come to think of it, he probably is). Sheriff Bell's ponderings grow increasingly tiresome. And Moss is also fond of sharing his hard-won truths with whoever will listen.
  
  McCarthy manages to paint a vivid picture of Texas at the Mexican border, but when two of the main characters in the book disappear and the reader fails to care, something is very wrong with the narrative. By the last twenty or so pages of the book, I just wanted to be done with it-especially when Sheriff Bell's musings increased from a page and a half to four pages. There's only so much homespun philosophizing one can take.
  
  
• a Trevanian potboiler without the razor
  By A11KB7X6Z680RI on 2006-02-07
  If you enjoy the fetishization of firearms, the eroticization of violence, and the cheezification of Faulknerian language, this novel is for you. It's Trevanian and Alistair MacLean with lots of italicized homespun wisdom. Macarthy's reputation is puzzling: his dialogue is hokey, his prose is impoverished American modernism (like Faulkner he likes to skip the apostrophe in contractions; like Joyce he eschews quotation marks), his characterizations are utterly uninteresting from a psychological perspective. This is not to say that he does not construct readable books. I gulped this one down right quick. But it's tripe.
  
  
• Meandering & Tiresome Story
  By A11B61QBGHLQDN on 2007-03-19
  I was unimpressed by this book. I didn't think it delivered a meaningful plot or significant character development. The story in fact seems truncated. Each time the writer begins to allow for interesting connections to characters they end with the death of the character or a change of scene. The antagonist of the story is more robotic than human. He resembles the terminator (1st one) in his relentless killing and stamina. He lacks personality, history or apparent purpose.
  
  Each part of the book begins with a soliloquy by the Sheriff that are not revelatory or profound. The final chapters of the book are told by the Sheriff and include his musings on the old times v. modernity. These lack insight and connection to the plot, as well as anything to intrigue readers.
  
  The ending and the way the book deals with the antoganist and other characters is unsatisfying. The book seems like a half-hearted attempt and left me scratching my head at the point of it all.
  
  
• From an avid British fan
  By A2EEHQH9SIFJQM on 2005-08-24
  I was delighted to be able to get a copy from the US just after publication and was full of anticipation before I read this. Having loved all of The Border Trilogy and been blown away by the scope and mastery of Blood Meridian, I wasn't quite sure what to expect.
  No Country For Old Men seems to go over territory that McCarthy knows so well, the dry western landscapes, the prevalence of good and evil in the american psyche and the apparently inescapable impact of violence, specifically guns on people's lives. There is also a wonderful fondness and simplicity in the relationship with animals, that we see in Moss at the very start.
  I have seen it argued that this is a book about the state America is in now, with specific reference to the onslaught of terrorism, but to me, from a distictly English perspective, it seems that what McCarthy is doing is setting up a plot which focusses around a drugs deal, but he makes us more interested in the lives of those around it, specifically the endearing honesty of the sherriff who has his own narrative thread. He contrasts this with the heartless nihilism of the man Chigurh, who seems to be very like the Judge in Blood Meridian.
  As always, Mccarthy is the most direct and intelligent of writers, not bothering with padding. When I finished the novel, with its fantastic last ,almost biblical scene, I could read nothing for days. Finally settled on Coetzee; he comes close.
  
  
• Compelling but empty
  By A1D2BCVJH74CL on 2005-11-01
  The book's style is compelling and readable, and it is easy to get through the economocial prose in a few days, but ultimately, the feeling I was left with was one of hollowness. this style--the pornographic descriptions of violence, the caricature descriptions of bad and immoral men--has been done before. James Elroy did it really well in White Jazz and LA Confidential, and the effect much more of a tour de force.
  
  Also, it seems strange that no one has picked up on the inconsistencies in the book. The sheriff fought in WWII? Moss fought in Vietnam but is currently 36 years-old? That would make sense if the book were set in the 1980s, but then the character Wells apparently carries a mobile phone. An elevator has computer-generated random codes to make it operate. In addition, Moss can't buy a gun because he lacks identification documents, but he is able to purchase a used truck. Hmmm. Some careful editing was needed here.
  
  In the end, diverting, but insubstantial.
  
  
• fails on all levels
  By A30FUTKOJRLATJ on 2007-12-13
  This is the 2nd McCarthy book I've read (the other one being the road). I thought 'The Road' was overrated but enjoyable, so I have this one a try. I am now convinced that Cormac McCarthy is the most overrated writer in the US right now. Literally 1/4 -1/3 of the book is exposition from the town sheriff. As you might be able to guess, it's quite difficult to make something like that interesting, and McCarthy can't. I found myself skimming those sections just looking to see if anything was relevant to the story (not really).
  
  McCarty also has an extremely annoying habit of stringing sentences together with 'and's. To accomplish this same Pulitzer prize winning feat, just take your grocery list, and add an and between each item, then prepend with 'he went to the store and got some...'. Give it a try, you'll be amazed.
  
  As for story structure, McCarthy can't decide who the main character is. (is it Bell, Moss, or Churgarh). That leads to very disjoint story telling.
  Then there's the climax (or lack thereof). I don't want to spoil the novel for anyone that might read it, but suffice it to say, the main climax that the entire novel is building toward doesn't ever happen (actually it does, but you hear about it from a random character after the fact).
  I don't know how he won a Pulitzer, and I don't know why he's being heralded as a great American writer. His novels are decent ideas, that are very poorly executed.
  
  
• Don't waste your time
  By A262GMTFWSO50M on 2008-01-31
  This is a tedious read. I haven't seen the movie, but I am sure the Coen Bros have done a great job as always. Nevertheless, McCarthy's writing style is painful to read. He is too cool for quotation marks--what is the point of that? Is it the IMPACT? That's what the whole book seems to be about, so again, it is probably a fantastic action movie. But in print form, I'd say it would be much better as a graphic novel. Unfortunately it comes accross as something that an 8th grader might write if he were held captive on a snow day and forced to spill his adolescent imagination onto paper (I imagine he'd write in red ink).
  
  
• Virtue Takes a Holiday
  By A3F3Z6SD04PPPA on 2005-08-13
  This is an extraordinarily complex and nuanced novel masquerading as a shoot 'em up. Like other of McCarthy's stories, the novel is propelled by the reflexively violent nature of men operating outside social constraints. The particular millieu for this story is the drug trade, depicted as an evil force of nature that makes claims on the lives of all the characters. The dynamics of the story lead toward entropy. The central figure is a West Texas sheriff clinging to old concepts of honor, who must confront the facts of a case he cannot solve involving a merciless killer he can neither name nor understand. His inability to do his duty to the people of the county he is sworn to protect amplifies a lifelong sense of inadequacy and duplicity that is revealed through a continuing interior monologue. Without giving away any elements of the captivating and fast-moving plot, the message seems to be inescapably dark: evil is afoot in the world, and we lack the tools and the will to defeat it. Our only small victories come from love and trust and as much selflessness as we can muster.
  
  The writing is extraordinary. McCarthy's style is of course mannered, but his words flow from the page and the voices of his characters are remarkably clear. The book is a delight to anyone who loves the language and loves to see it used well, and the story works on so many levels that it is difficult to imagine anyone -- apart from those who find violence offensive --who will not find something to take away from this novel.
  
  
• Deeply Underwhelming
  By A32VHXCSSJB6EP on 2006-05-17
  There's so much you want to like here--the story moves briskly, the characters are vivid, the atmosphere crisp and tangible--that the flaws in "No Country for Old Men" are that much more painful and annoying. McCarthy beats you to death with West Texas patois and folk mumbles, uh, wisdom. He's got so much macho pain, death, revenge, FOREBEARANCE, and careful politeness to women going, this reads like a Texan Ranger training manual. Then there's this Hemingway thing. No adjectives. Short sentences. And finally, some sort of curmedugeon rumblings about things just gettin'out-of-control. And so many, many rumblings. You really feel like you're fighting against the current working your way to the of this story. And then, it just ends with all the loose ends flying. I don't know.
  
  
• A hard review for me to write
  By AATQGPIGIKOXB on 2005-09-02
  This is a tough review for me to write. It's not a particularly positive one, and that's the tough part. I am an enormous Cormac McCarthy fan. I own a copy of every book he's written, even his play, The Stonemason. I loved all his early novels. I believe Blood Meridian to be his masterpiece, and I'm glad he received all the accolades he did for the Border Trilogy. All that being true, I'm disappointed with No Country for Old Men. I think, actually, that it's my least favorite of all his novels.
  
  At the beginning I was impressed with the crime-novel feel of it. I would've welcomed a more traditional McCarthy novel, with all of his verbal pyrotechnics and beauty, but I didn't mind that he'd turned that down a bit and was doing something different. I'd heard that the book was fast and furious, and considering that I like well written crime fiction I didn't look down on McCarthy moving this way. The first few violent scenes are written with a graphic, lyric beauty that nobody does better. It's reminiscent of James Carlos Blake and James Lee Burke: two authors who've undoubtedly learned a thing or to from McCarthy. I'd of been content if the novel had continued right through to the end with the same driving plot and action. But it doesn't.
  
  About 3/4 of the way through the crime drama of the novel is over, and we shift almost completely to the Sheriff Bell's meditations on the poor state of American society. (Apparently, blue hair and nose rings are a sign of the decline of our civilization, along with not saying "mam" and "sir".) Maybe I'm thick, but none of his rambling narration made much sense to me. I don't mean that it's hard to follow, I just mean that maybe McCarthy is TOO successful at rendering this man's voice. It's a bit tiresome. I get his point, but it doesn't feel like he has anything to add. It's like he's old enough that he feels he has no ownership, no control or stake in the future, no ideas on how to make it better, no hope that that's even possible. If I was sitting across from this guy in a bar I'd be looking for a way out of the conversation. Unfortunately, for much of the later portions of this novel I was likewise wishing it was over. The narrative tension that drove so much of it is simply left lingering. The main conflict that you might think the novel is heading for never materializes.
  
  I read somewhere that this manuscript was cut down considerably from what McCarthy first handed in. I didn't know what to make of that when I first heard it, but now I think it was probably a good thing. Had this been longer I'd probably have grown more and more against it. As is... Well, if you're a McCarthy fan there's nothing you can do but read it. Maybe you'll like it better - as many here seem to have - or maybe your admiration of the writer will armor you against some of the faults. If you're new to McCarthy I don't recommend beginning here. Try All the Pretty Horses. If you like that head on to some of the earlier novels, like Outer Dark or Child of God or Suttree. And if you're still on board definitely try Blood Meridian. There's no other novel like it in the world. No Country for Old Men, in my opinion, does not shine with the unique voice and vision of those works. That said, I remain in awe of this author. As I'm writing this I'm flipping through the opening pages of All the Pretty Horses.. And now through the beginning of The Crossing... These books are absolute magic. The great books McCarthy has written live on. This just isn't one of them, and it sort feels like an injustice to author to pretend otherwise.
  
  
  
• One Star Country
  By A2MWH0GB79R2PK on 2005-10-09
  I am an old man. Lived in Texas for 24 years. Too bad the lowest rating is one star ... this book deserves less.
  
  
• Horrible Book
  By A12U4VZ6MHFK4R on 2007-07-23
  Old Cormac seems to think he doesn't need to conform to the way stories are normally told... this is such a horrible book, it makes my eyes cross... the storyline is tedious and the ending leaves you just angry that you wasted some of your time on earth with this piece of trash.
  
  The storyline breaks away from the main character to follow the ramblings of an old man that could have been wrapped up with the phrase "kids these days!" He does everything but complain about the music of these young kids.
  
  Horrible story... just a mess.
  
  
  
  
• I Don't Get It
  By A1DPCXO7RDZM0S on 2007-11-18
  The Cormac McCarthy mystique eludes me. I found Blood Meridian utterly without redeeming qualities, and an admirer of McCarthy convinced me to skip Suttree with a one-paragraph synopsis that ended, "But in the end you get to kind of liking him."
  
  Sorry, no. I'm not interested in the redeeming qualities of necrophiles, and I find McCarthy's moralizing no more persuasive than the pieties of preachers waving their dogeared Playboys at sinners. I bought No Country for Old Men because of the film, and its only redeeming quality is I now feel no need to see the film. Which is too bad, because I respect the Coens and Tommy Lee Jones, and the movie would have cost less.
  
  McCarthy's "spare" language is an affectation as tiresome as the voluminous silks of Aubrey Beardsley. "Ahhhh yep" is not my idea of great prose. His stories are ugly, nasty things that make one earn for a Disney movie or a bit of chocolate, just to get rid of the taste. Here, the three most likeable characters -- and it isn't much of a competition -- are all killed in horrible degrading, cruel detail. One hopes Mr. McCarthy shaves his palms regularly.
  
  

• The Road (Oprah's Book Club)
• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
• The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain (Everyman's Library)
• All the Pretty Horses
• Oil!