No Country for Old Men
When American writer Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, passed away in June 2023, I felt compelled to finally read the novel.
Set in the stark landscape of 1980s Texas, it opens with a drug deal gone wrong: bodies scattered across the desert, a truck loaded with heroin, and a satchel holding $2.4 million.
From this grim tableau emerges the novel’s three central figures: Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran who chances upon the money and cannot resist taking it; Anton Chigurh, a methodical, near-mythic hitman sent to reclaim it; and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, an aging lawman trying, almost helplessly, to shield Moss and make sense of the violence unraveling in his county.
Moss runs, and Chigurh hunts. Along the way, the hitman leaves a trail of bodies. Despite Moss’s grit and resourcefulness, he is eventually killed off-page by Mexican drug runners. Chigurh recovers the money, survives a violent car crash, and disappears once more into the night.
The novel closes with Sheriff Bell’s retirement. In his final dream, his father rides ahead of him through the darkness, carrying a fire, a symbol of hope, I guess.
Beneath the thriller’s momentum lies a meditation on fate, free will, and the moral erosion of America. Much of the book is told in the third person, with spare, unadorned prose, but McCarthy inserts brief first-person reflections from Sheriff Bell, lyrical, mournful passages that deepen the novel’s sense of loss and bewilderment.
I found the book utterly compelling: taut, unsentimental, yet haunting. It reads like a thriller, but its power lies in the darkness beneath, and in that final, fragile image of a small fire held against the darkness.