The book that became the Oscar: a review

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t like quotation marks. He’s not always a fan of apostrophes either, which at times can grind on a person who likes her punctuation where it should be, when it should be there – punctual punctuation, if you will. But different construction can still yield a beautiful final product.

The description on the back of No Country for Old Men calls the novel “blistering” and, for once, this is not just hyperbole. The story takes place along the Texas-Mexico border and you can feel the heat: the heat of the sun, the heat of the desert, and the heat of the hunt. And this really is a hunting story, with one man – Anton Chigurh – hunting down another – Llewellyn Moss. This of course leads to a third man – Sheriff Ed Tom Bell – hunting down Chigurh. It’s a very sparse hunt too; no hard-to-believe escapes, no convoluted plans to snare the prey, no surprise characters that suddenly thwart the actions of the hunter. In a way, the writing is almost juvenile, as if McCarthy started writing a children’s book but ended up with a very grown-up story.

This is writing in its simplest form. McCarthy keeps the story moving and doesn’t waste time with superfluous description or back story. The only real back story we get is from Sheriff Bell’s narrations, but this is more Bell pontificating on the state of society and the world and how this is changing the small corner of Texas he has sworn to protect. Through this, though, we see a man who is proud to be sheriff but who is getting tired, wearing out and wondering why he sometimes even bothers; he reminisces and offers a eulogy for the way life was. Bell is tired, but McCarthy doesn’t set it up for the good sheriff to take one last brave ride and collar the outlaw. Bell does perform his duty as sheriff, of course, but this isn’t a story that gets wrapped up all pretty-like, with a big bow. The book instead plays out to what the reader soon realizes is really the only possible conclusion.

I’ve read that Sheriff Bell acts as the moral compass in a story of right and wrong, good and evil. But I don’t see him, or anyone, acting as a moral compass. Rather, Bell is just another man who gets involved in something that can’t be defined as simply right or wrong because that would imply knowledge of right and wrong. Instead, it’s about survival and as the events unfold, Bell realizes the world and life he knew can no longer survive.

McCarthy brings extraordinary people and events into the lives of some very ordinary people, but it never feels overdone. There is nothing preachy, nor is there a heavy moral slant. McCarthy simply tells a story – albeit a pretty grim, depressing one – and tells it very well. I want to use words like “gritty” and “raw” to describe the book, but that just feels too cliché. And perhaps that is what strikes me most about No Country for Old Men – it is not clichéd at all. It feels honest, from the characters to the setting to the way the events unfold. And that is what makes this such a fantastic read.