Sons of guns in the new Wild West

Published on Sunday 23 October 2005 00:23

No Country For Old Men

Cormac McCarthy

Picador, 16.99

THIS is Cormac McCarthy's first novel since completing The Border Trilogy. Even the spare best of Elmore Leonard would have trouble beating this neo-Western in a foot race.

The action commences in Texas as an antelope hunter named Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the wreckage of a drug deal gone awry. Moss finds, in addition to some dead bodies, a satchel stuffed with more than $2m. Before he can begin spending it, Moss meets the first in a wave of mean son-of-a-guns assigned to retrieve the loot. The worst of them is a bounty hunter named Chigurh (pronounced Sugar), who despatches roadblocks with the efficiency of the Terminator.

Although a great deal of the novel concerns Moss's flight to safety, this is no mere thriller. Like all McCarthy's books, No Country For Old Men meditates on the battle between good and evil in men and society.

This world of narcotics echoes the Wild West, and retribution remains an empty but inevitable ritual. Like the Westerns to which it tips its stetson, No Country For Old Men has more gun battles than characters, but the scenery has a campy present-day feel. Instead of horses, McCarthy's outlaws ride pick-ups. Uzis, not six-shooters, are the weapon of choice.

These cinematic touches keep the nihilism at bay for a while, but cannot fully disguise the bleakness. Nietzsche saw living as essentially an exercise in "appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker". That being the case, it is not Moss but Chigurh who is this book's hero. He acts unilaterally, belittling those he kills, arriving in each scene with a bouquet of the book's darkly blooming themes.

McCarthy is smart to keep this vastly readable book short. After all, one can only sit through so many such speeches before retreating into numbness. Stripped of commas and quotation points, not to mention any excessive description, the novel rockets forward like a bullet train.

In a way, form follows function here - for McCarthy has twisted the Western into a shape that mirrors its sociopath antihero. The prose of McCarthy's early novels required effort to hack through. This book is entirely the opposite - it ensnares us with its smooth surface, then coaxes us into blackness.

A happy ending would only spoil the book's purity of vision. There is no love in No Country For Old Men. Nor redemption for that matter. Normally, after finishing a book like this, we are meant to return to our cosier world with relief. This book's dark spell means that doing so is impossible - at least for a day or two.