Thursday, July 21, 2005
Review: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Top 100 Ranking: 56
Writing Style-8.9
Originality-8.0
Plot-8.9
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-8.3
Overall-8.6
'How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. 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?'
-Anton Chigurh
Alright, there’s no question, I’m a McCarthy fanboy. So writing a review of this book is going to be hard.
I LOVED IT!!!!!! IT KICKED ASS!!!!!!!!!
Ok, enough with the gushing, I’ll try to move on towards some semblance of objectivity now.
At first glance this is a huge departure from anything else McCarthy has done.
What’s different:
-It’s crime noir
-There might be more sentence fragments than run-ons
-There are probably no more than 3 words in the entire book that you would need a dictionary for, as compared to Suttree where you pretty much can’t get through a sentence without a dictionary and there are even words that you’d be hard-pressed to find a dictionary that included them.
-There are no lengthy, poetic descriptions of the landscape or people.
-The plot is simple to follow, there are no hazy, Faulknerian sections where you have to puzzle through what is actually going on.
-It’s feels fairly contemporary, set in 1980.
-I don’t recall a metaphor with the words “like some” in it.
What’s the same:
-His patented grim determinism
-It’s set in Texas near the border
-There’s a really, really bad mythic dude. What Judge Holden from Blood Meridian was to the late 1800’s, Anton Chigurh is to the late 1900’s.
-Lots of violence
-Its dripping with masculinity
-There’s a lot of respect for the old timers and great sadness in the fact that as the world changes, their ways of life and values and morals no longer apply
-Great dialogue with regional euphemisms
The writing is pared-down a lot with a strong focus on moving the plot along. Whereas he used to write long beautiful descriptions with very long sentences to set the scene, but then the dialogue would be extremely sparse, simple, and straightforward. Now everything, not just the dialogue, is economical. I recently read The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy and at times it reminded me of that; electing to write a series of very short sentences in place of one long one and the fixation with describing the guns and the gunfire and the bullet wounds and so forth. It’s as though he’s proven his whole career that he is a masterful “prose stylist” (as everyone, even his detractors, will admit) and now he wants to prove that he can write a classic noirish thriller that is a page-turner and will make a good movie (he’s already sold the rights, btw).
This may sound like a bad thing or that he’s sold out, but he’s so good, it works. It is, in fact, a fast-paced whirlwind novel. I almost read it in one sitting the same night I bought it, but I finally conked out at 2:00 AM.
And there’s just so much classic McCarthy in there. It’s so romantically manly, Chigurh is such a great bad guy, Sheriff Bell and Llewelyn Moss are such likable-yet-flawed-and-ultimately-helpless good guys, and the dialogue is touching, stark, at times funny, and subtle.
I don’t want to get too much into the plot (you can read the inside cover synopsis on Amazon if you wish) because I suspect more than one of my readers plans to read this book regardless of reviews or what it’s about, and I think it’s more fun sometimes to go into a book or movie without knowing too much about it.
But very briefly, there’s a drug deal that goes south and everybody dies leaving a bunch of heroine and ~2.3 million dollars. Moss finds the money while hunting. Chigurh is a sort of hired hand/assassin-type bad-ass who sets out to find the drugs and money and kill anyone who messes with him. Bell is the good ole boy sheriff who’s trying to solve the murders, find the bad guys, and save lives, mainly Moss’, before Chigurh gets to them. The action is interlaced with sections of italicized monologue from Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
Bell’s monologues were particularly problematic for me at times. I had to ask myself, ‘How much of the author is in Bell’s character?’ because there were times that I just didn’t agree with Bell. Let me explain.
McCarthy has repeatedly written about the decline of a society and has repeatedly written about people pining for the good old days. Por ejemplo, John Grady Cole going to Mexico because too much of Texas was fenced in or the orchard keeper shooting at the big metal government water tank standing on the horizon and ruining the landscape or the growing filthiness of Suttree’s Knoxville. But this was subtle and romantic and had to do with days that were long before my lifetime. No Country for Old Men, however, is set within my lifetime and the manner in which Bell speaks on the causes of his world going to hell in a handbasket is far from subtle. He talks about the difference in getting in trouble in school during his days as being things akin to chewing gum or talking in class, whereas today there’s drugs, rape, and shootings in schools. He talks about young people with green hair and nose piercings and how you can tell that society is shot when people stop saying maam and sir. At times, he just sounds like a crusty old curmudgeon like my own grandfather or Zell Miller who think that our biggest problems are hippies smoking pot, gangsta rap, violent video games, and baseball players using steroids. As opposed to my opinion that our biggest problems are the lack of a truly independent news media, conflicts of interest that arise when you combine lawmakers and their campaign costs and large amounts of money from companies and organizations pimping their agendas, or an education system (particularly in the south and middle of the country) that fails miserably at producing adults who can think critically.
So, in short, connecting Cormac to Bell and then to Zell is something that I just can’t deal with. So, I’m gonna give him (Cormac) the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s just being true to his character. Because lets face it, a good ole boy cop from BFE, Texas is probably gonna be more than a little bit Zell-like. There, no dilemma. But still, Bell does get a bit preachy about contemporary issues, which distracted me a little. Overall, he’s a good, smart, very kind guy though, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like he’s total hick or anything.
Okay, there you have it. I think the last two that McCarthy’s written, No Country and Cities of the Plain, are nowhere near as good as the rest of his books. I liked Cities of the Plain a little bit more because of what I had already gone through with the characters from All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But I still loved No Country. It shows a new facet of McCarthy’s talents and it makes a nice complement going from Blood Meridian (his first western novel) through the Border Trilogy and up to 1980 and No Country.
Writing Style-8.9
Originality-8.0
Plot-8.9
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-8.3
Overall-8.6
'How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. 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?'
-Anton Chigurh
Alright, there’s no question, I’m a McCarthy fanboy. So writing a review of this book is going to be hard.
I LOVED IT!!!!!! IT KICKED ASS!!!!!!!!!
Ok, enough with the gushing, I’ll try to move on towards some semblance of objectivity now.
At first glance this is a huge departure from anything else McCarthy has done.
What’s different:
-It’s crime noir
-There might be more sentence fragments than run-ons
-There are probably no more than 3 words in the entire book that you would need a dictionary for, as compared to Suttree where you pretty much can’t get through a sentence without a dictionary and there are even words that you’d be hard-pressed to find a dictionary that included them.
-There are no lengthy, poetic descriptions of the landscape or people.
-The plot is simple to follow, there are no hazy, Faulknerian sections where you have to puzzle through what is actually going on.
-It’s feels fairly contemporary, set in 1980.
-I don’t recall a metaphor with the words “like some” in it.
What’s the same:
-His patented grim determinism
-It’s set in Texas near the border
-There’s a really, really bad mythic dude. What Judge Holden from Blood Meridian was to the late 1800’s, Anton Chigurh is to the late 1900’s.
-Lots of violence
-Its dripping with masculinity
-There’s a lot of respect for the old timers and great sadness in the fact that as the world changes, their ways of life and values and morals no longer apply
-Great dialogue with regional euphemisms
The writing is pared-down a lot with a strong focus on moving the plot along. Whereas he used to write long beautiful descriptions with very long sentences to set the scene, but then the dialogue would be extremely sparse, simple, and straightforward. Now everything, not just the dialogue, is economical. I recently read The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy and at times it reminded me of that; electing to write a series of very short sentences in place of one long one and the fixation with describing the guns and the gunfire and the bullet wounds and so forth. It’s as though he’s proven his whole career that he is a masterful “prose stylist” (as everyone, even his detractors, will admit) and now he wants to prove that he can write a classic noirish thriller that is a page-turner and will make a good movie (he’s already sold the rights, btw).
This may sound like a bad thing or that he’s sold out, but he’s so good, it works. It is, in fact, a fast-paced whirlwind novel. I almost read it in one sitting the same night I bought it, but I finally conked out at 2:00 AM.
And there’s just so much classic McCarthy in there. It’s so romantically manly, Chigurh is such a great bad guy, Sheriff Bell and Llewelyn Moss are such likable-yet-flawed-and-ultimately-helpless good guys, and the dialogue is touching, stark, at times funny, and subtle.
I don’t want to get too much into the plot (you can read the inside cover synopsis on Amazon if you wish) because I suspect more than one of my readers plans to read this book regardless of reviews or what it’s about, and I think it’s more fun sometimes to go into a book or movie without knowing too much about it.
But very briefly, there’s a drug deal that goes south and everybody dies leaving a bunch of heroine and ~2.3 million dollars. Moss finds the money while hunting. Chigurh is a sort of hired hand/assassin-type bad-ass who sets out to find the drugs and money and kill anyone who messes with him. Bell is the good ole boy sheriff who’s trying to solve the murders, find the bad guys, and save lives, mainly Moss’, before Chigurh gets to them. The action is interlaced with sections of italicized monologue from Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
Bell’s monologues were particularly problematic for me at times. I had to ask myself, ‘How much of the author is in Bell’s character?’ because there were times that I just didn’t agree with Bell. Let me explain.
McCarthy has repeatedly written about the decline of a society and has repeatedly written about people pining for the good old days. Por ejemplo, John Grady Cole going to Mexico because too much of Texas was fenced in or the orchard keeper shooting at the big metal government water tank standing on the horizon and ruining the landscape or the growing filthiness of Suttree’s Knoxville. But this was subtle and romantic and had to do with days that were long before my lifetime. No Country for Old Men, however, is set within my lifetime and the manner in which Bell speaks on the causes of his world going to hell in a handbasket is far from subtle. He talks about the difference in getting in trouble in school during his days as being things akin to chewing gum or talking in class, whereas today there’s drugs, rape, and shootings in schools. He talks about young people with green hair and nose piercings and how you can tell that society is shot when people stop saying maam and sir. At times, he just sounds like a crusty old curmudgeon like my own grandfather or Zell Miller who think that our biggest problems are hippies smoking pot, gangsta rap, violent video games, and baseball players using steroids. As opposed to my opinion that our biggest problems are the lack of a truly independent news media, conflicts of interest that arise when you combine lawmakers and their campaign costs and large amounts of money from companies and organizations pimping their agendas, or an education system (particularly in the south and middle of the country) that fails miserably at producing adults who can think critically.
So, in short, connecting Cormac to Bell and then to Zell is something that I just can’t deal with. So, I’m gonna give him (Cormac) the benefit of the doubt and say that he’s just being true to his character. Because lets face it, a good ole boy cop from BFE, Texas is probably gonna be more than a little bit Zell-like. There, no dilemma. But still, Bell does get a bit preachy about contemporary issues, which distracted me a little. Overall, he’s a good, smart, very kind guy though, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like he’s total hick or anything.
Okay, there you have it. I think the last two that McCarthy’s written, No Country and Cities of the Plain, are nowhere near as good as the rest of his books. I liked Cities of the Plain a little bit more because of what I had already gone through with the characters from All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. But I still loved No Country. It shows a new facet of McCarthy’s talents and it makes a nice complement going from Blood Meridian (his first western novel) through the Border Trilogy and up to 1980 and No Country.
