No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

James Wood was stunned like a downer beef by the cliches of pulp fiction in No Country for Old Men. But I liked it. I liked the violence, I liked the guns, I liked the senselessness. As always, McCarthy is a master at portraying filth, squalor, and meaninglessness, and what better gallery for that talent than the border narcotics trade? The only place to go down from there is the apocalypse.

Briefly, the story is about a sharpshooter named Moss who runs across a drug deal gone bad. Dead bodies everywhere. The money for the deal is still at the scene, so he takes it. Soon several competing parties are in hot pursuit — drug lords, a manhunter, the county mounties, the feds, and a freelance psychopath named Anton Chigurh. The plot is fairly unimportant, and will no doubt be made much clearer by the upcoming Coen Brothers movie.

No country for old men, indeed. I heartily agree with Kakutani (okay, it happens sometimes) that about the fifth time Sheriff Bell or some other old coot bemoans the youth of today or that durn television box, I was ready to wring the soppiness out of my copy. Folks stop openin’ doors for each other, pretty soon they’s shootin’ each others brains out with cattle stunners. Or something like that. The flashbacks and regrets Bell and Moss have about their war experiences affected me the same way. I felt they were much more cliched than the shootouts and burnt-out cars.

In a generous reading those passages highlight the unfathomable alienness of Chigurh, who never even approaches the tiny degree of humanity possessed by the other McCarthy character he’s most compared to, the Judge in Blood Meridian. As far as we can tell, he’s nothing more than a robotic killing machine, programmed with a self-servingly fatalistic ethic, of a sort. Or perhaps we are to understand Chigurh and his type as a necessary element of a Manichean world, the way black holes are a necessary part of the universe’s dynamics. We don’t understand them, we hope never to have to deal with them, but they are vital to existence itself.

Which brings us to the inevitable attribution of “biblical.” McCarthy’s style does remind one of the Old Testament, but not any more than it reminds one of Hemingway and Faulkner and Shakespeare. What is more biblical about McCarthy than his use of the running “and” is his perspective on violence. When McCarthy says, “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he’s echoing the theme of the Bible from Adam’s fall to the cross.

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