No Country for Old Men (novel)

No Country for Old Men

First edition cover
Author	Cormac McCarthy
Language	English
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	July 19, 2005
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	320 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	0-375-40677-8 (Hardback edition)
OCLC	57352812
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 22
LC Class	PS3563.C337 N6 2005

No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, who had originally written the story as a screenplay.^[1] The story occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country. Owing to the novel's origins as a screenplay, the novel has a simple writing style that differs from McCarthy's earlier novels. The book was adapted into a 2007 Coen brothers film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Title[edit]

The title of the novel comes from the first line of the 1926 poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by W. B. Yeats.^[2]

Plot[edit]

The plot follows the paths of the three characters set in motion by events related to a deal gone bad near the Mexican–American border in Terrell County in Texas.

Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a deal gone awry that has left all but one dead. That man, barely alive, asks for water. Moss responds that he does not have any, then while searching for other survivors, finds a body some distance off with a satchel containing $2.4 million in cash. He takes the money and returns home. He returns to the scene with a jug of water. A new truck is there. He tries to run, which sparks a chase through a valley. This is the beginning of a hunt for Moss that stretches for most of the novel. Moss sends his wife to her grandmother in Texas, while he leaves his home with the money.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell investigates the crime while trying to protect Moss and his wife, with the aid of other enforcement. Bell is haunted by his actions in the Second World War, for which he received a Star. 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. Chigurh is a killer whose weapons of choice are a shotgun and a pistol. Carson Wells is also on the trail of the money. Moss recovers at a hospital while Chigurh patches himself up in a room with supplies. Moss is approached by Wells, who offers to give him protection in exchange for the satchel and tells him his location and number.

Chigurh finds Wells and murders him just as Moss calls to negotiate the exchange of money. Chigurh tells Moss that he will kill Carla Jean unless he hands over the satchel. Moss remains defiant and calls Carla Jean and tells her that he will meet up with her at a motel in El Paso. Carla Jean decides to inform Sheriff Bell about the meeting and its location. This call is traced and provides Moss' location to some of his hunters. Sheriff Bell goes to the hospital to identify Moss' body. Chigurh arrives at the scene and retrieves the satchel from the duct in Moss' room. He returns it to its owner and later travels to Carla Jean's house. She pleads for her life and he offers her to flip a coin to decide her fate, and she refuses. She chooses heads, and the coin turns out to be tails. He is hit by a car, which leaves him injured. He limps off down the road.

Bell decides to retire and drives away from the courthouse feeling overmatched and defeated. Bell describes two dreams he experienced after his father died. He met his father in town and borrowed some money from him. Bell was riding his horse through a pass in the mountains. He could see his father up ahead of him carrying a horn lit with fire, and he knew that his father would ride on through the pass and fix a fire out in the dark and cold and that it would be waiting for him when he arrived.

Reception[edit]

The early and late critical reception of the novel was mixed. William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15, 2005), characterized 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".^[3] 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".^[4]

In contrast, literary critic Harold Bloom did not count himself among the admirers of No Country for Old Men, stating that it lacked the quality of McCarthy's best works, particularly Blood Meridian, and compared it to William Faulkner's A Fable. When comparing the lack of "moral argument" in Blood Meridian to the heightened morality present in No Country for Old Men, he considered stating that the "apocalyptic moral judgments" made in No Country for Old Men represented "a sort of falling away on McCarthy's part".^[5] Furthermore, McCarthy has received criticism for the presence of Mexican "drug-related" violence, while lacking the presence of a Mexican character.^[6]

The novel has received a significant amount of critical attention, for example, Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach and Jim Welsh's edited collection No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film^[7] or Raymond Malewitz's "Anything Can Be an Instrument: Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men."^[8]

Film adaptation[edit]

In 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen adapted the book into a film, also titled No Country for Old Men, which was met with critical acclaim and box office success. On January 27, 2008, the film won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. On February 24, 2008, it won four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh).

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to No Country for Old Men.

• McCarthy, Cormac (2005). No Country for Old Men. Random House. ISBN 0-375-70667-4.
• Cant, John (2008). Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-98142-2.
• "Vintage: No Country for Old Men". Random House.
• Nichols, Mary P. (Fall 2008). "Revisiting Heroism and Community in Contemporary Westerns: No Country for Old Men and 3:10 to Yuma". Perspectives on Political Science. 37 (4): 207–215. doi:10.3200/PPSC.37.4.207-216.