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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, July 31, 2005

Cormac McCarthy's guns, cliches blazin'

By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
Associated Press

Cormac McCarthy's characters play hard in "No Country for Old Men."

Derek Shapton | Knopf via Associated Press

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Early in "No Country for Old Men," a hunter comes upon the aftermath of a massacre in the Texas desert. After taking stock of the victims, he discovers a trail of blood — one of the men has escaped death, but not for long.

"You ain't goin far," he said. "You may think you are. But you ain't."

The hunter is Llewelyn Moss, and his decision to follow the trail launches Cormac McCarthy's propulsive new novel, his first in seven years. Soon enough, Moss' knowledge of the injured man's doom becomes the reader's foreboding that Moss, a rugged Vietnam War veteran and a decent man, cannot long survive his involvement in a bloody chase back and forth across the Mexican border.

Moss is being tracked by the implacable killer Anton Chigurh over millions of dollars in drug money Moss took from the scene of the massacre. But Chigurh's real interest lies in another sort of currency, one that has nothing to do with tangible bills.

His weapon of choice is a pneumatic stun gun normally reserved for cattle — he aims it at human foreheads. He sometimes lets people flip coins to determine an unstated bet — on their lives, as it turns out. As he says to one stranger:

"I can't call it for you. It wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be right. Just call it.

"I didn't put nothin' up.

"Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life. You just didn't know it."

Lines like this are so boilerplate they would force double takes if the action weren't going by so quickly. For some, the National Book Award winner has always been more style than substance, a pale William Faulkner imitation. With often-trite plot lines and stand-by-your-man ladies, McCarthy is easy to criticize, but it's difficult to separate his romanticized view from the pleasures of his novels. Style begets substance in a vision that either sweeps you off your feet or leaves you sitting cold.

In the end, "No Country for Old Men" proves irresistible, thanks largely to Chigurh. A Western villain to end all villains, he is more unstoppable force than man. And McCarthy gives him plenty of open, lawless space in which to operate.

While readers may desperately root for Moss, they cannot harbor much hope.

Those familiar with such McCarthy novels as "Blood Meridian" will recognize the darkness embodied by Chigurh. Here, though, he is offset by Sheriff Bell, the local officer left to deal with the widening circle of destruction surrounding Chigurh.

Bell is an upright man, nursing a guilty conscience over his failings in combat and growing despair over the world's direction — the old man for whom there is no country. McCarthy watchers might puzzle over how many of his crusty, reactive views mirror the author's, but they seem too stock to belong to an actual person.

"I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there ain't nothin short of the second comin' of Christ that can slow this train," Bell tells readers.

He sure can't. The good sheriff is out of the action, and his salt of the earth reflections, delivered as italicized monologues, do their best to bleed out all the considerable life running through the novel. What old-school sheriff worth his pointed badge has time for so much moralizing when there's a psychopath on the loose?

Bell's hardened belief in right and wrong seems irreconcilable with Chigurh's ruthless violence. Yet, in ways that Chigurh might recognize and Bell likely would not, the two men are closer than they appear. As the killer says to one of his victims:

"This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?"

Both men are absolutists, but only one is beyond corruption of his ideals, and it isn't the one doing the sermonizing.