Cormac McCarthy: No country for old men

The lure of the West as a dramatic setting for a novel is that it is the frontier where laws are flexible or non-existent, and characters have to define themselves. Out there in the badlands people created their own moral codes.

This is physical and novelistic territory that American writer McCarthy has explored frequently, notably in his Border Trilogy of novels All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plains.

He revisits the Tex-Mex landscape for No Country For Old Men, its title taken from Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium and a reference to the transience of life.

But this dark and murderous story has a more contemporary setting than the Border Trilogy.

It is the early 80s, heroin is flooding into the United States, the war on drugs has just started, and while out hunting antelope on the plains, Vietnam-vet Llewellyn Moss comes across abandoned vehicles, dead bodies, a trunk full of heroin and something over $2 million in bills which he takes, knowing it will have some fatal consequences.

Told in a hard-bitten style where description of location and emotions are cut to the minimum, the author recounts Moss' flight as he is pursued by the murderous Chigurh, and Wells, who has been hired by the drug barons. He is also sought by those out to protect him, notably the older Sheriff Bell whose reminiscences punctuate the story and speak of how times have changed and there are new forces unleashed on the land, of which Chigurh is emblematic.

Bell also offers homespun wisdom: "It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."

This is a world of gunplay in hallways and streets, of holing up in cheap motels, unfettered bloodshed, and frequent death.

Sentences here — much of the book is dialogue — are a few tough words delivered with the accuracy and brevity of a pistol shot. Sometimes the exchanges are droll — "It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff?" "If it ain't it'll do until one gets here" — but the language is pared to essences. The word "nothing" rings like a refrain to re-enforce the isolation, despair and nihilism at work in the barren landscape

These are violent, blood-soaked pages with a fair count of underdeveloped characters (notably Bell's wife who plays a key but understated role), stereotypes (Chigurh as an emotion-free killing machine is almost cartoon-like in his lack of dimension) and a smidgen of hokum philosophy.

Part new-Western, part thriller and mostly an evocation of a world where formerly agreed-upon codes of conduct and morality have been abandoned, it isn't an easy read. And sometimes a frustrating one as McCarthy tries ambitiously — but awkwardly — to marry meditations on morality with a neo-Western sensibility and the nature of mortality.

* Graham Reid is an Auckland writer and critic.
* Picador, $34.95