Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men

It is rather dubious to write something about you've read a month ago, right? But I'm still doing it. I read Cormac McCarthy's great novel No Country For Old Men during the Christmas holidays, but the book still lingers in my mind, so I thought I'd try to get away with it. (And I know, I know, this is a very bad and not very intriguing way to start a blog post...)

As everyone reading this blog knows, the Coen brothers' equally great movie was made from McCarthy's novel. I can't think of many other examples where the mastery of cinema is as evident as in this film. Every scene, every cut, every camera move is necessary. Nothing is wasted, nothing is there for vain.

Same goes for McCarthy's narration and prose style. It's very clipped, without the quotation marks and parentheses. It works miraculously well, even though it's very elliptical at times. (There's one scene in which I think I caught McCarthy for using unnecessary words and commenting what the person in the scene was doing as an omniscient narrator.) This is what "hardboiled" was invented to mean.

Yet, McCarthy is one the of the US Nobel prize candidates. He writes dirty, mean and lean books about criminals and what havoc they bring on the world. Why doesn't Elmore Leonard can't be the candidate for the Nobel as well?

I'm not saying that there are no hidden depths in Leonard's books, but in McCarthy there sure are. I remember talking with my dad about the Coens' film and he said he couldn't find anything to say about it, even though he thought the film was very well made. It's very easy to say that the film - and the book - are about the disappearing world in which people still respected each other. This is brought out by the sheriff's monologues throughout the book and the film. It's also easy to believe this is the view McCarthy himself has. But I don't believe this is correct. McCarthy asks us to look into our easy nostalgia and ask ourselves if things really were better in the past. There are not many hints into this theme, but - as a liberal European, of course - one of those things was that the sheriff talks against abortion. He thinks it's degrading, but to my mind it's a sign of useless clinging to the past.

You might want to compare what the sheriff is saying to the charismatic killer's speeches he keeps just before he kills his victims. He's eloquent and says beautiful things about how people waste their life. In fact he's not saying anything. It's just bubbles, something a salesman or a consult might say to a customer he's never met before. He lures us to think he's got something meaningful to say. The killer is just one of those self-help demagogues that fill the bookshops with an endless row of books about - nothing. In this way, he's a prophet of the coming times and as such even scarier than he is as a killer. (Even though Chigurh is one of the scariest motherfuckers in the pages of any book.)

In the end of the book, the sheriff sees a dream about his father, himself also a sheriff. In the dream, the father rides on a horse to shine a light to a distant darkness. It's not easy to see what McCarthy has in mind in this scene, but it probably has to do with this notion: whatever we do, we must not lose hope. Someone has to cast a light in the darkness that's also called life. It's just that we have to put our hope also in the hands of those whose values we don't share. The life is scary and we can't do anything about that.

PS. It's said that the Coens' film is very faithful to the book. Yet I couldn't find the scene from the film in which  Josh Brolin shoots a dog chasing him in the book. Can anyone confirm it's not in the book? 


PPS. I'm posting this on Friday, but this is not a part of the Friday's Forgotten Book series, hosted this week on this blog.