Product Description
In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
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 Answers ALL questions to movie!
I saw the movie and had so many questions....I was so glad that the book clarified all the "cliffhangers" left by the movie. Took me about 2 days to finish reading, could not put it down. If you liked the movie, you'll be glad you read the book.
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 An amoral thriller ( malone_syndrome )
It is said that when the nineteenth-century Spanish General Narvaez was asked on his deathbed if he forgave his enemies, his response was: 'I have none. I have had them all shot.' Towards the end of Cormac McCarthy's novel, when hired gun Anton Chigurh declares: 'I have no enemies. I don't permit such a thing', the same thing is meant. [p. 253]
Chigurh is a killer pursuing trailer-trash Texan Llewllyn Moss. Moss has stumbled upon a drug deal gone wrong whilst out hunting antelope one day. A trail of dead bodies leads him to a briefcase with a seven-figure sum of cash in it. Moss decides to run off with the loot: the chase begins. In the background, ageing sherrif Tom Bell laments the whirlpool of violence he has thus been sucked into. His thoughts and reminiscences crenelate the sequence of chapters, providing what is meant to be the moral centre of the book.
I bought this book for two reasons. Reviews indicated that it was both an excellent thriller, and a story that had a moral undergirding. In summary: it had a good plot and it left you with something to think about.
As a thriller, the book is certainly superior to nearly anything you'd see on the shelves these days. It moves at a cracking, almost impatient pace and hardly lags for a moment. But one could scarcely say that the McGuffin driving the plot is original. A stolen/pursued briefcase (typically full of cash) has been done to death before in novels and films such as Psycho, What's Up Doc, Pulp Fiction, Ronin, A Simple Plan, and (surprise, surprise) Fargo.
Anton Chigurh is the main character in a book with no heroes. Although he is an arch-villain, it's fairly plain that McCarthy has not written him with the intention that the reader should despise him. Rather, his aura is one of awe-inspiring turpitude, and his image is consecrated with all the most ruthlessly cool dialogue and scene-stealing moments. While dispatching a victim 'Chigurh shot him three times so fast it sounded like one long gunshot' [p. 103]; after he climbs seventeen flights of stairs he is 'breathing no harder than if he'd just got up out of a chair' [p. 198]; moments after being blasted from a distance by Chigurh, Moss says to himself: 'Damn, what a shot.' [p. 114] Even his victims admire him: this is Anton Der Ubermensch.
But Chigurh's character has been sketched too hurriedly. The much-misunderstood word 'psychopath' is hurled about. Anyone familiar with the writings of Dr. Robert Hare on the issue would know that most diagnosable psychopaths are not luridly violent, merely ruthlessly unprincipled and self-serving. Yet on p. 141 we have Carson Wells (whom seems to know Chigurh better than anyone else in the book) profiling him as 'psychopathic' and then twelve pages later telling Moss that 'You could even say that he has principles.' That's just lazy.
So awful is Chigurh that his moral surroundings must be correspondingly lowered: half the people he kills are themselves criminals, and his main nemeses are a sheriff with a dark past (Bell) and a thief and manslaughterer (Moss, who manages to unknowingly shoot an old lady [see p. 151]). This backdrop serves the dual purpose of (i) not making Chigurh look too cartoonishly evil; and (ii) not alienating this chicly fascinating killer from the reader too much. Thus, one gets the impression that in creating Chigurh McCarthy first and foremost set out to deliberately create an impressively amoral black hole in human form, but then allowed the gravitational field exerted by him to morally distort the characters around him. That smacks of poor discipline.
Despite these cavils, however, the book is written with a wonderfully laconic style that makes for very brisk and engrossing reading. Where many other authors would have gone into distracting descriptions of the largely irrelevant, McCarthy has been wisely economic with the details. The plot ends in a bizarrely unsatisfactory way, and it's not clear what sort of lesson we're meant to draw from it all. Thus one could say that the story lacks a moral. And morals.
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Oh how the world has changed ( srdavenport )
Riveting story and amazing writing. If you are looking for a happily ever after, this is NOT the book for you. The "man on the run" storyline hooks you and keeps you going. But what makes this book truly amazing is how McCarthy subtly shows how in 30 years (from the 1950's to the 1980's) how the world has drastically changed. Going from an age of Ozzie & Harriet and Leave it to Beaver where people thought saying "damn" was a swear word and no one felt the need to lock their doors. To a world where drugs, murder, sex, and violence are the norm.
McCarthy immediately pulls you into the story and into the character's lives. The ending (which is a somewhat different than the movie AND better than the movie) was fantastic. It doesn't end with everything neatly taken care of, in fact you wonder what is going to happen with a few of the characters. But at the end you can't help but say "WOW!!"
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 A Book That Approaches Greatness
This is one of those rare books that actually translated into a better film. The movie version deservedly won Best Picture for 2007, and it certainly benefited from its source material. However, McCarthy's writing is curious, to put it mildly. His prose is alternately insightful and infuriating; he is not content to write in a traditional style, which sometimes works to the book's advantage and sometimes works to its disadvantage. His subject matter is dark and ambitious, and in some ways, his writing fits it, but not always.
No Country For Old Men is written mostly in staccato form, which captures the fragmented nature of man's behavior but is also downright maddening at times. There are sections where this seems appropriate, but in a number of instances, it's vexing and downright frustrating to read. There is also a lot of southern vocabulary, which does indeed add to the genuineness of the setting and makes the story more vivid, even if you have to have a dictionary alongside you. The names were also very southern-sounding but also a bit pretentious, not to mention difficult to pronounce, at least at first (Chigurh? Llewelyn?). The most affecting parts of the novel are the interposing thoughts of the Texan sheriff at the center of events, which are both elegant and heartbreaking.
The names are the only thing about this book that even suggest pretentiousness. The story is simple yet tense and full of meaning. Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad, complete with rotting bodies and a suitcase full of money. He takes this suitcase, but he makes the mistake of returning to the crime scene to try to save the one man who was still alive. For some reason or another that is never really explained (but is implied), Chigurh is there and spots him, thus setting in motion the events that make up the rest of the novel. This scene is a perfect way to start the book off. Llewelyn likely would have gotten away with his misdeed had he not stumbled over his own conscience, and he is aware of this beforehand, yet he marches on to almost certain devastation. Right from the outset we are presented with complex characters and layered interactions, and they never disappear.
This is much, much more than just a chase novel, even though the chase takes up much of the narrative. The themes of predestination, chance, and adaptation are presented subtly and skillfully. Does our basic sense of humanity and goodness prevent us from living a live free of conflict and harm? Is the world so infested with evil that we cannot hope to lead a life free from its infection? These are just some of the questions McCarthy asks us, and he doesn't give us any facile answers. Despite a somewhat problematic approach, No Country for Old Men lives up to its reputation as one of the better novels in recent years.
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Shocking, stunning and VERY relevant in our country today... ( croixian )
Right off the bat: I'm 41 years old and have been an avid reader since I was about 7 years old (when I read Watership Down), and this book quickly nestled itself into the top ten books I've ever read.
If you are reading this, more than likely you have seen the movie and are interested in the book. Just remember, the book is almost always better than the movie, as is the case here.
For all you morons who gave this book one and two stars: You have not one single clue as to what true literature is and you probably think Shakespeare is a cartoon character from the 1960's.
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