A couple weeks ago I found No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for sale at Half Price Books. I'd eyed it since picking up Blood Meridien and, later, The Road, which is on my reading list posted previously.
Let's just get this out of the way. Cormac McCarthy is a sunnuvabitch of a writer. This book is not for the faint hearted. My wife would probably throw it across the room and yell at me for making her read this depressing as hell mess.
I loved it.
It's a book that teases your sympathies. It begins with Llewellyn Moss, a Texas veteran of Vietnam who lives in a trailer and spends his time hunting. He finds a drug deal gone wrong in the desert countryside. Dead drug dealers abound, as do dangerous firearms, heroin, and a bundle of millions of dollars. Moss takes the money and runs, knowing full well he just kicked off a bloodbath, and he's likely to see some of his own blood spilled. He does, and much worse.
McCarthy paints scenery with a kind of language that his southern Texas denizens would appreciate. How he captures such vivid beauty and horror with what at first blush looks like broken grammar and colloquial ignorance is a mystery. His prose is Faulkner-esque. It captures the music of a people that his own narrator describes as "common as dirt."
In the works I've seen from McCarthy, this is his trademark. He writes this sparse prose devoid of much punctuation. Few apostrophes. No quotation marks, so the dialogue blends in with the prose. Hell, he writes sentences that would get his old grammar school teacher to break out the brass ruler on his knuckles. No verbs. A sentence, at once barren and colorful. (Take that, grammar school teacher!)
He also does a trick of shifting perspectives. He begins a new perspective with a pronoun, often "he." The effect is that we're piecing together this mess of a moving crime scene story, and I think it makes the reader pay more attention, to sit up and consider not only who's doing what, but especially how they compare to one another.
At times, my tired eyes had to re-read a sentence, perk up my mind's ears and hear the colloquial phrase. But, it's all there. Every mean as hell piece.
At its core, this is a story with a painful resolution. For me, at least, the story wasn't about what I presumed. I waited for something, some kind of justice to the awful killing spree of Anton Chigurh, the hitman after Moss.
It never comes. Which means that whatever I thought I was paying attention to was misguided. McCarthy sucker punched me with Moss. He had me hooked the moment Moss was stupid and decent enough to go back out to the dying drug dealer with a jug of water. And, same for that girl he got killed. Cocksure and all, I still love Llewellyn Moss.
But it's the sheriff. That's were the story is, it turns out. And, the story is a kind of apocalypse for the Western. It's the sheriff's last round, and he knows he's done. He is. I feel sorry for that old boy, as they'd say in Texas.
He's no Llewellyn Moss, but I can't say I blame him. Neither am I.
No Country for Old Men: A
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