 No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. Set along the United States–Mexico border in 1980, the story concerns an illicit drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert location. The title comes from the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.
Summary
The plot follows the interweaving paths of the three central characters (Moss, Chigurh, and Bell) set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the Mexican-American border in southwest Texas.Llewellyn Moss is an antelope hunter and Vietnam War veteran who stumbles across the aftermath of a drug-related gun battle which has left everyone dead save a single badly wounded Mexican. Moss finds a truck full of heroin and a satchel with $2.4 million in cash. He takes the money, but leaves the Mexican alive, which ignites a hunt for Moss that stretches for most of the remaining novel.
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell investigates the drug crime while trying to protect Moss and his young wife with the aid of other law enforcement. The sheriff is haunted by his actions in World War II, for which he received the Bronze Star Medal. Now in his late 50s, Bell has spent most of his life attempting to make up for the incident when he was a 21 year-old soldier. He makes it his quest to resolve the case and save Moss.
Complicating things is the arrival of Anton Chigurh, a violent sociopath hired to recover the money. Chigurh uses a captive bolt pistol (called a cattlegun in the text) to kill many of his victims and destroy several cylinder locks to open doors. In one of his final murders described in the book, he gives a long speech about causality and fate to his victim. Wells, a rival hitman and ex-partner of Chigurh, is also on the trail of the money.
McCarthy tells the story in two voices. The bulk of the book is presented in third person, interspersed with first person reminiscences from Sheriff Bell. The reliance on dialogue and the sketchbook revelation of plot details lends a mystical air to the work. For example:
when you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon somethin that you may not very well be equal to… When you've said that it's real and not just in your head, I'm not all that sure what it is you have said.
Literary significance and criticism
William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15, 2005), characterizes McCarthy as "our greatest living writer" and describes the book as "a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames." On the other hand, in the July 24, 2005, issue of the New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum," but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages."
Film adaptation
A film adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen was released in 2007 to critical acclaim. |
