Book Review: No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

One-line summary: An implacable modern-day Western that strews words like bodies across the page.



My first encounter with Cormac McCarthy was The Road. I was not impressed.

But for some reason, I felt like coming back for more. Some urge to see if he wrote better stories when he wasn't dipping his toe in an unfamiliar genre.

Hey, guess what? He does!

Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 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 how desperately Moss and his young wife need 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 up and down 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 that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.

Reviews:

Goodreads: Average: 3.97. Mode: 4 stars.
Amazon: Average: 3.8. Mode: 5 stars.

( I might become a Cormac McCarthy fan after all )

Verdict: Bleak and bloody and brilliant, except when the author gives too much page space to cranky old man Sheriff Bell, who's about as useless in the book as he is in the movie. But No Country for Old Men convinced me to reconsider Cormac McCarthy.

Book Review: No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

One-line summary: An implacable modern-day Western that strews words like bodies across the page.



My first encounter with Cormac McCarthy was The Road. I was not impressed.

But for some reason, I felt like coming back for more. Some urge to see if he wrote better stories when he wasn't dipping his toe in an unfamiliar genre.

Hey, guess what? He does!

Set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico, this is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since Cities of the Plain completed his acclaimed, best-selling Border Trilogy.

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 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 how desperately Moss and his young wife need 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 up and down 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 that society is waging on itself, and an enduring meditation on the ties of love and blood and duty that inform lives and shape destinies, No Country for Old Men is a novel of extraordinary resonance and power.

Reviews:

Goodreads: Average: 3.97. Mode: 4 stars.
Amazon: Average: 3.8. Mode: 5 stars.

( I might become a Cormac McCarthy fan after all )

Verdict: Bleak and bloody and brilliant, except when the author gives too much page space to cranky old man Sheriff Bell, who's about as useless in the book as he is in the movie. But No Country for Old Men convinced me to reconsider Cormac McCarthy.