I recently finished Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel No Country For Old Men and once again I am, well, blown away. The book is rich, beautifully written, yet haunting and very violent. But Cormac’s violence is more instructive than sensational, and the events that unfold in this south Texas tragedy could have easily taken place in Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia backwaters or along Faulkner’s dusty Mississippi roads. Epic violence set against the backdrop of a primal human conflict that has occupied the pages of many, many writers. I found the following review accurate.Set along a bloody frontier in our own time, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, bestselling Border Trilogy.While I was delighted to find Cormac back in action, I was even more delighted when I read the news that the ever-poignant Coen brothers (O Brother, Where Art Thou, Intolerable Cruelty, The Man Who Wasn’t There, etc.) have decided to film this book. I was disappointed when Cormac’s All the Pretty Horses got the Hollywood shakedown a few years ago with such poor results, so hopefully this time we have directors more fitted to the task. Read it before the movie comes out, folks.Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and over two million in cash. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. But only after two more men are murdered does a victim’s burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes that Moss and his young wife are in desperate need of protection. One party in the failed transaction hires an ex-Special Forces officer to defend his interests against a mesmerizing freelancer, while on either side are men accustomed to spectacular violence and mayhem. The pursuit stretches along and across the border, each participant seemingly determined to answer what one asks another: How does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?
A harrowing story of a war society wages on itself, an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, and a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.
