No Country For Old Men

McCarthy's flinty, masterful meditation on the nature of evil
Fans of the Coen brothers' Oscar-winning adaptation were instantly struck by how perfectly they captured the tone of McCarthy's novel: the existential sparseness, the preference for action over words and the sudden, brutal bursts of violence. McCarthy, who no doubt includes himself among the old men of the title, has fashioned a gripping thriller that also serves as a profound meditation on the nature of evil. Anton Chigurh, a spectral hit man who dispatches his victims with an apparatus lifted from a slaughterhouse, is more a force than a man, an unstoppable malignancy rolling across west Texas like a wall of cloud.

A drug bust gone wrong and a missing suitcase of cash puts Chigurh on the trail of Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran whose survival skills are quickly put to the test, and in turn draws the notice of small-town sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a wise but weary figure whose ability to comprehend the world around him seems to lessen by the day.

McCarthy's writing is spare and brutal, honed down to a flinty edge (although he occasionally indulges a penchant for vocabulary that would stump an SAT coach). Although the novel's subject is dark, its prose is unfailingly awe-inspiring, elegant without being showy. Even at his most pessimistic, McCarthy reminds you that there is beauty in the world.

© 2005 by Cormac McCarthy