Book Review: No Country for Old men

Its with great trepidation that I am approaching the desk to write a review of my last read - Cormac McCarthy's 'No Country for Old Men'. Did I like it? No. Did I dislike it? Hmmmm - I liked the movie and the movie is a faithful adaptation of the book. Its just that the prose version of what I saw in the movie was a tad too overbearing.

The plot is indeed seductive. Its a "modern" western set in the desert plains of Texas in the 1980s. So instead of horses and cowboys, you have trucks carrying loads of dope and cash and drug peddlers over the US-Mexican border. And then there are men - men with ununderstandable Southern accents, virtuous men who hold onto age-old values and traditions, men with bad hair cuts (okay! this is coming from the movie - the book did not mention the bad hair-cut), and men who would not think twice before committing a evil deed. And there is loads of machismo - guns, wounds, blood, bullets, horses, fights and chases. But sadly, where are the women? The entire book has only one woman and about 200 bad men. And just like Venus divine, she is homely, loving, caring and family oriented. Everything that the men in the book are not and everything that the virtuous old men in the book lament about. Through the western drug-deal-gone-dowdy plot, what McCarthy bemoans about is the complete degradation of values and morals and ethics in the American society to such an extent that the country is no good for anyone to live in, let alone the older populace. That is the credence for the title of the book, in case you are wondering.

So a rumpled, dusty, fit and agile antelope hunter called Llewelyn Moss, during one of his hunting escapades in the desert plains lands up on a scene of massacred drug dealers close to the Mexican border. Their dope is intact, but the cash they were carrying is missing. As Moss follows the trail some more, he lands up near one more corpse who carries a case with about $2 million in cash. Moss makes off with this suitcase full of cash that also contains a hidden transponder that alerts the villain to his every move. The villain, being Anton Chigurh - an enigmatic, cold blooded, emotionless murderer who stalks Moss throughout the book, almost like a ghost. He kills ruthlessly and thoughtlessly, anybody who comes into contact with him, loading bullets into people's heads seemingly just for kicks. A complete sadist, he tosses a coin to determine whether or not he'll spare the life of the owner of a small convenience store and the only lady in the book, Moss's wife, Carla Jean. And the device with which he commits most of the mass murders in the book is so inventive - its a pressurized thingie used to stun and instantly kill cattle. And the unexpressed satisfaction that he gets out of zonking out the brains of his victims using this stun-sten-gun is only left to the imagination of the reader.

Pursuing both Moss and Chigurh throughout the tale is the grand old virtuous man, the Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who also plays the dual role of the narrator of the book. Against this backdrop of ruthless killings and overall creepiness, Sheriff Bell ponders the meaning of existence and decadence of old-fashioned values, which would be pretty boring for a complete book, if it were not for the murderous Chigurh and his fleeing cattle.

Having explained the excellent plot and the gripping story line, let me proceed to my main grouse against this book. This is my first Cormac McCarthy read. And I must say that his writing style befuddles me. Its tedious and exhausting, to say the least. He rushes through his story so much so that he completely misses the well-intentioned commas, apostrophes, exclamation marks, quotation marks, and all the grammatical accessories. I am sure these were invented by ancient geniuses of the script for some reason. And when you find it missing, is when you realize its value. Call me old-school, but I had a hard time making out the meaning of his written word. Its as if he is so economical with his usage of words and epithets, that he discounts the usage of frillage. Point in case, the following conversation between Carla Jean and Sheriff Bell:

'These people will kill him, Carla Jean. They won't quit.
He wont neither. He never has.
Bell nodded. He sipped his coffee. The face that lapped and shifted in the dark liquid in the cup seemed an omen of things to come. Things losing shape. Taking you with them. He set the cup down and looked at the girl. I wish I could say that was in his favor. But I have to say I dont think it is.
Well, she said, he's who he is and he always will be. That's why I married him.
But you aint heard from him in a while.
I didnt expect to hear from him.
Were you having problems.
We dont have problems. When we have problems we fix em.
You're lucky people.
Yes we are.
She watched him.'

Notice the small structured sentences, the lack of metaphors or adjectives, and the complete omission of the fluffy fandangles. Another thing which caused me considerable grief was that inspite of rushing through the prose, it seemed like you landed nowhere. So you are running more and more, you are getting tired, but apparently there is nowhere to sit and catch a breath, and it still seems like there are miles to go. He explains every step taken in minutest detail. But again within his self-constructed grammatical (un)restrictions. 'He opened the refrigerator. He looked in. He took out the milk, drank some from the carton, sealed the carton, and put it back in the refrigerator. He closed the door.' Everything in the book is compact, yet so seemingly endless towards the horizon. Also call me unhandy, but the focussed attention towards the mechanical rigor also seemed like a pain in all the wrong places. "a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser with a laminated stock”; “the shotgun was a twelve gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish”; “he unzipped the case and took out a stainless steel .357 revolver and went back to the bed”; “a Tec-9 with two extra magazines and a box and a half of shells.”

But all said and done, the book's plot is enough to give you sleepless nights and you can so easily see how the movie rights for this book might have been snapped up by some eager production house as soon as they were out available. The movie is definitely a faithful adaptation of the book and Javier Bardem looks so evil in the role of Chigurh that it seems that the role was just written with him in mind. Just the fact that he survived that outlandish hair gear and still managed to knock your balls off with his evil glare is totally commendable.

Chigurh as a writer's invention is probably the scariest invention ever penned. And for that due credit needs to go to McCarthy. Just how psychopathic Chigurh is, can be realized in one of his final confrontation scenes with the innocent Carla Jean. He is almost omniscient in that scene where he tells her "there is nothing that can change what has been preordained." He makes her call a coin toss; she loses the call. This, too, it seems, was fate: “Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.” And somewhere between the lines, you can see the writer blowing up Chigurh with so much power and awe that you almost wonder whether McCarthy wishes to play God. Maybe he does. All story tellers do. The book is their fantasy, where the characters are puppets in their hands.

As a book that laments on the downfall of much cherished values and morals, this book did not work for me. As a literary accomplishment, this book did not work for me. Where it did work for me, was the brilliant plot and that memorable character whom Moss refers to as Sugar - the psycopathic villain to be feared for all ages to come.