'That is no country for old men'.... so begins one of W B Yeats most famous poems, 'Sailing to Byzantium'. The country in question here, in this potent novel, is southern Texas on the Mexico border; part of what is often referred to as 'flyover country' that great hinterland of the United States between the east and west coasts, 'that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night', and a place that Cormac McCarthy has visited before in his novels. It is also his own country for, although born on the East Coast, the majority of his childhood and adolescence was lived in Tennessee. He is a writer who has only really entered my field of few in the last few years, and this is the first novel of his that I have read.
'No country for Old Men' is a three way tussle between the Ed Tom Bell the sheriff, Llewelyn Moss the petty criminal, and the psychotic Anton Chirgurh, the hired killer. The novel opens with the discovery of a sprawl of corpses and abandoned vehicles in the desert. Moss has stumbled upon some sort altercation between drugs gangs, or some such. And among the dead and the dying he makes a further discovery, one that drives the narrative. That fight in the desert is never fully explained, for this is a lean, tense novel, sparse in the way that Jean Pierre Melville's cinematic masterpiece 'Le Cercle Rouge' is sparse. (sparse of punctuation too) Information is withheld from the reader. In one sense it doesn't matter, the novel is not about Mexican drug cartels as such but a personal conflict between three men. A concentrated affair, that is part thriller, part Western and part meditation. The result of this economy of information, however, is that the reader is left wandering through, what I can only describe as, a nocturnal battlefield. A novel of darkness and fire. And one I would recommend.
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