Seven years after the groundbreaking Border trilogy, Cormac McCarthy has returned to that literary landscape he has made his own, the American-Mexican border: a near-fantastic tabula rasa of unmapped and unknowable spaces and histories, populated by people in thrall to geographic and climatic necessity, and for whom both the present and the future represent only a succession of unavoidable challenges; a landscape endlessly redrawn and reshaped in the formulations of new brutalities, new expectations and new desires.
No Country for Old Men is perhaps McCarthy’s most contemporary fiction. And unlike, say, the Border trilogy or Blood Mountain, where experiments with prose and narrative style almost subsumed in places the stories being told, No Country sees a return to the far simpler structures of Child of God and Outer Dark, where the unfolding tension and speed of events engage the reader, and where the prose is paced and tempered accordingly.
And McCarthy’s prose is never less than knowingly and superbly tailored, honed and polished to its very specific and powerful purpose, combining here the simple-seeming language and savage grace of Jim Thompson with the lyrical and evocative toughness of William Faulkner.
No Country concerns the intersecting lives of Llewelyn Moss, who comes across two million dollars amid the shot-up cars and scattered corpses of a desert drug deal gone wrong, Chigurh (‘Sugar’), a Mexican assassin in search of the money Moss has stolen, and Sheriff Bell, the experienced, world-weary lawman in pursuit of them both.
Focussing equally on all three players — and with Bell’s inner monologues providing the events of the novel with a moral anchor and depth — McCarthy drives his story back and forth across the borders of the desert and civilisation, and beyond all planning or preparation. Fate here — life and death — rests in places literally on the toss of a coin or on something half-glimpsed and barely recognised in a rear-view mirror.
McCarthy’s desert is once again a physical, elemental and all-encompassing presence in this novel, and is never reduced to cipher or metaphor, and is certainly never employed solely as a decorative backdrop to the wayward lives and terrible events unfolding within it. Equally present and exerting its own magnetic pull on those events and characters is that other, perpetually out-of-reach and ever beckoning border of California with its usual promises of ease and plenty.
Since the publication of Suttree over 20 years ago, hardly a reviewer here or in the US has considered a new McCarthy novel without recourse to the word ‘masterpiece’. It is easy to understand why. Let down by a dull and inappropriate jacket and a succession of Hollywood straplines instead of a blurb, No Country for Old Men is a compelling, harrowing, disturbing, sad, endlessly surprising and resonant novel.
Robert Edric’s novels include In Desolate Heaven, The Book of the Heathen and Peacetime.
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