No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

“You don’t owe nothing to dead people”

Cormac McCarthy, one of the most revered contemporary American fiction writers, won acclaim in literary circles with books like Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and especially his latest work The Road for which he was awarded with the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. However, one might safely state that outside the literary circles, he will perhaps be best remembered for No Country for Old Men, the book he wrote prior to The Road, thanks in large parts the Coen Brothers’ raging adaptation of the book. The movie certainly played the part of getting the book across to a far wider audience that it would ever had otherwise. That’s not a bad thing though. It is a terrific work of fiction writing and screams to be read by anyone who manages to lay his hands on it.

No Country for Old Men (henceforth to be referred to here as No Country), set in the 1980’s Texas, is a modern day Western that derives much of its strength through an expert recreation (or rather deconstruction) of the “Wild, Wild West” days, what with its laconic weather-hardened male protagonists, a strong sense of all-American machismo, and harsh, unforgiving landscapes. A sense of foreboding engulfs nearly every single set-piece, blood and honour play the principal driving forces, and violence lurks at every conceivable corner ready to erupt with tremendous fury at the first given opportunity. However, in the tradition of great revisionist Westerns, the sense of honour is mostly twisted to suit personal convenience, the showdowns are ugly and sudden, romanticism seems a misplaced word – morality more so, and hardly any character has the kind of redeemable virtues like the older days’ Westerns. In fact, the only sympathetic character in the novel seems both helpless and anachronistic vis-à-vis the other protagonists.

The novel literally kick-starts when a Vietnam War veteran and a welder by profession, Llewelyn Moss, while hunting for antelopes near the Mexican border, stumbles upon a bloody crime scene littered with a host of dead and half-dead Mexicans, and 2.4 million dollars of unattended drug money. He shouldn’t have taken the money, and once he did, he shouldn’t have returned to the crime scene to show a “dumbern’ hell” Anton Chigurh sense of generosity. But then, like any tragic hero, he takes the not-so-wise decision on both occasions, and sets loose on his trail one of the nastiest literary villains one can hope to come across.  He isn’t just a psychotic assassin with a hydraulically operated cattle gun as his weapon of choice and whose identity is as mysterious as his near-telepathic ability to track down people he is after, he is the true embodiment of the phrase ‘Angel of Death’. An insurmountable force of nature, Chigurh is a damn tough person to escape from, and hence we realise that Moss, despite his dogged refusal to bow down and his exceptional survival instincts, can only run for so long. In the meantime, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, an old-timer at heart and mind, who is unfortunate enough to be investigating the trail of blood left behind by Chigurh, and who happens to be the moral backbone of the story, can only lament at the rapid escalation of violence engulfing the human society. He knows this is a battle he is not cut out for. Hence, all he can do is go about his duty with undiminished sincerity yet with a quiet sense of resignation.

As the summary suggests, at the very core of the book lies a good-versus-evil story of almost biblical proportions. And in McCarthy’s hands, the characters of the principal players, irrespective of the number of words or pages devoted to him, have been vividly realised. Chigurh might be astonishingly competent in his job. But his character is more of a human incarnation of the Satan himself than of any mere mortal. He is like the ghost who walks – unfathomable, enigmatic, beyond reproach or retribution, and with a near superhuman streak about him that sets him apart from the other two principal players of the novel. And the fact that anyone can use a bulky cattle-gun to puncture holes into his victims’ heads with cold and ruthless efficiency, and at times choose to decide the fate of stray individuals with an ominous coin-toss (like he does in the memorable sequence with a gas station owner), make his presence both chillingly effective and darkly funny.

Ed Tom is the complete antithesis to Chigurh. His silent sniggers and his world-weary cynicism might imply otherwise, but he certainly hasn’t lost faith in humanity. He just doesn’t believe that he has it in himself anymore to do his job as before, especially given the sudden advent of a new enemy in the form of drugs-dealers and their ilk. His long, soul-searching and deeply personal monologues at the beginning of each chapter, and oftentimes the most brilliant aspect of the novel, are filled with melancholy and nostalgia – a strong urge to return to those good old times when Sheriffs didn’t feel the need to carry guns, or so he says. In all probability, the ‘good old days’ were as violent and crime-ridden as the timeline captured in the book; hence Ed Bell’s monologues are just an indication of man’s innate inclination towards making one’s mind to believe, as we all tend to do, that the past was so much better and quieter than what it is today.

Moss, like the quintessential gray character, lies somewhere in between. Yes, he doesn’t kill for money, and doesn’t participate in random acts of violence. But anyone who doesn’t think twice about his young, demure wife’s fate before hitting the road with a stash full of blood-soaked money, can not really qualify as the good guy, even if he is still the person we all root for despite his comeuppance, so to speak, being decided in the first few pages of the book. Only that our instincts were too clouded to get the subtle hints so early into the story. Hence when he gets accidentally killed in gunfire with a bunch of crazy dopers in the middle of nowhere, just when we were expecting the final last-man-standing kind of showdown with his nemesis Chigurh, brings forth the kind of memorable irony that made No Country so much better than the sum of its parts.

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, all the three characters described above are bound by their singularly similar traits – they are laconic, honourable (if Chigurh’s deliriously inverted code of honour qualifies as one), and with sardonic senses of humour that speak volumes about their natures and the way they view the cold and hostile world around them. Its not that they don’t feel pain or guilt; nevertheless, they are driven by the archaic, even a tad chauvinistic, adage that ‘men don’t cry’. Yes, they are the quintessential muscular all-American action heroes of the type who carry guns not to intimidate their enemies but to shoot if so required. And yes, they know the basic essence of the riveting plot full well, that there is no such thing as a clean getaway.

One minor character in the form of Carson Wells, another bounty hunter who has been hired to get hold of the mysterious Chigurh and retrieve the money from him, appears midway, but gets bumped off as soon as he starts drawing our interests. He reminded me a lot about Eli Wallach’s hilariously loquacious character in the legendary spaghetti-Western by Sergio Leone, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Carla Jean, Moss’s wife, is again one minor character but her importance cannot be overstated insofar as juxtaposing her naïve, Christian beliefs in the inherent goodness of beings, and her thoroughly simplistic and cocooned outlook about life and the world around her, with those of her husband which happen to be anything but. She forms the comforting shroud that a war veteran, who has seen a lot of ugly stuff, is in total and complete need of. Thus, Moss is completely withdrawn from the society around him, but his fierce loyalty towards his wife ensures that he never betrays her with another woman even when overtly suggestive offers are made to him while he is on the run.

The most distinctive and compelling feature of No Country lies in McCarthy’s cinematic economy of prose. The narrative is filled with dry and darkly humorous wit that managed to elicit a chuckle every time – including that distinctly Texan twang. And the simmering violence and the deep sense of guilt that pervades this relentlessly bleak book made the black humour and irony not just memorable but also utterly effective. The bare-knuckled and supremely engaging style of writing has the ability to have the readers clutch onto the book as if it is a populist thriller, though masquerading underneath is a prophetic morality tale and a deadly serious (even, nihilistic) view of a world gone horribly and irrevocably wrong. Thus the fact that the book manages to be a compact, lightening-fast read, despite its philosophical ruminations, has ensured that even those usually daunted by the thought of venturing outside the Ken Follets and the Sydney Sheldons will find the book as gripping a read as any. And McCarthy, through the sheer brutal force, raw energy and thunderous vitality of his words, and by brilliantly punctuating moments of somber contemplation with tearing wit and chilling mayhem, has shown his ability to entertain the ‘paperback airport-novel readers’ and captivate their more discerning counterparts with equal ease.

As we are all aware of, Joel and Ethan Coen, aka the Coen brothers, turned the book into a movie – perhaps one of the best of the decade – with devastating and unforgettable effects. It went on to at last win the Coens’ their first Oscars for direction, apart from three more, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Though the book was perfect for celluloid adaptation, on hindsight it seems no one but the Coen’s could have done it so effectively, even though the movie is one of the most loyal cinematic adaptations of a literary source material that I have personally come across. I liked the movie perhaps a bit more, but comparisons aside, I would strongly recommend the book to everyone, including those, who, like me, ended up watching the movie first.

What is he supposed to be, the ultimate bad-ass?

I don’t think that’s how I would describe him.

How would you describe him?

I guess I’d say he doesn’t have a sense of humour.