No Country for Old Men

No slow start in this thriller - the murder of a deputy and escape of a sadistic killer; the fortuitous find by the hunter, Moss, amidst the corps of a Mexican drugs war gone wrong; propels the reader into the heart of the action immediately. But then Moss makes a stupid decision, and the hunter becomes the hunted.

The writing style is spare, with short clipped sentences that help to keep the action moving apace.

Sheriff Bell is investigating the deaths, which are occurring all over the state, and he is trying to get to Moss before the sadistic killer does. He appears to have an affinity for Moss and his young wife, Carla Jean, it could be because they remind him of himself and his wife when they were younger. But as the gruesome end unfolds, we learn that Sheriff Bell carries a secret, he made an error of judgment when he was younger and it has haunted him all his life, and he wants to save Moss and Carla Jean from making a similar error.

I enjoyed the novel, but I think the film was better, mainly because whilst a film can be carried by plot and action, I think a novel needs to be carried by a stronger theme throughout. The theme which links Moss' actions to actions taken by Sheriff Bell when he was younger feels tagged on near the end. A week after finishing this book I wasn't still thinking about the theme in the way I did when I read The Road by the same author.

George Hamilton is author of Secrets From The Dust

Really did not care for the style of this writing. No quotations, hard to follow who was talking. There is a lot of symbolism, can't say that I got all of it either.

Moss and chigur are really something though. There calm and thought out demeanor of Chigur is chilling.

Written in McCarthy's typically spare, cinematographic prose NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a compelling story depicting how fate is often shaped beyond our control. Moss looks upon his unexpected situation through a haze of greed, resignation, and conflicted feelings about the direction his life's taking. Chigurh pursues Moss with clinical calm and unwavering belief that his actions are preordained and unavoidable. And sheriff Bell looks for clues in his past as he tries to find a way to face a new world that produces such calculating killers. There's an almost manic meticulousness to the way McCarthy describes the preparations for violence, the violence itself, and the consequences. We're treated to blow-by-blow accounts of the mayhem and how the walking wounded medicate themselves in the aftermath. Although it might be argued that the characters are rather stereotypical and the plot a little over-boiled, McCarthy manages to keep the pages flying by while still providing some moving and wistful musings on the inevitabilities of our existence.

As is the case with most great writers, Cormac McCarthy's genius is primarily found in the details (the best words in the best order). His craftsmanship is given voice in soaring, searingly brilliant language that draws on distinguished forebears (Melville and Faulkner) and is welded to a subtle, layered and keenly perceptive moral vision. A writer to whom we can turn not just to escape, but to learn, McCarthy is a master artist whose novels are built to last.

Throughout "No Country for Old Men" (2005), the author fashions a sparse, carefully weighted prose (simplified in comparison to his masterpiece, "Blood Meridian") to portray characters in the varying, mottled condition of their souls. Their very flaws are what distinguish them in their (fallen) humanity from a man thriving in the realm of darkness. Discrepancies in plot and action, carped at by some reviewers, are in truth reconciled when seen as illuminating the wavering tendencies of the human beings portrayed and their various apportioned destinies.

The hunter Moss steals drug money he comes upon in the Texas desert, knowing full well the danger it brings, not just to himself, but to his wife and extended family. His precarious balance on the tightrope that runs between good and evil leads him down the path to ruin.

In the hinterlands (so we may believe) beyond good and evil, a hitman named Chigurh views himself as a walking talisman- an instrument simply acting out his destructive part in the human drama with the confidence that the predestined cosmic die has been cast. Chigurh manifests a demented, legalistic scrupulosity and honor in upholding the cards that have been dealt by fate and his role as executioner of a grim, aleatory philosophy.

The narrative thread by the ageing Sheriff Bell (woven from start to finish of novel)- both his pondering of the bloody events and ruminations on a lie under which he has lived his life- charts the "fencepost" position occupied by most human beings. Unlike the nihilistic neutrality of the Kid in "Blood Meridian" (choosing not to choose)- Bell makes choices, some good and some bad, but none in the sense offered by Chigurh's false game of chance or ("Blood Meridian" ) Judge Holden's diabolic will to power.

Every book by Cormac McCarthy deserves respect- if "No Country For Old Men" doesn't rise to the heights exhibited in "Suttree" or "Blood Meridian", it still ventures forth into a territory of the soul that very few writers are bold or talented enough to tackle.

No Country for Old Men is Steinbeck's Pearl set in the southwest with a lead character, Llewelyn Moss, who is a bit more morally ambiguous. Moss finds a suitcase of $2 million in cash admist the violent remnants of a drug deal gone bad and then takes it and runs to seek a better life for him and his wife. His morals, however, cause him to go back to the scene of the crime (how stupid is this) where he is discovered by the smartest and coldest killer ever created, an agent of destruction with no soul, who proceeds to hunt Moss down. Of course, there is the smart and good hearted Sheriff Bell, who seems to understand what is going on for the most part, and provides a kind of narrative to the events as they unfold, as he tries to help Moss and his wife. Mr. McCarthy is a great writer and I just do not think this is one of his better books. I preferred his other books, like "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing", both of which I thought were brilliant, filled with wonderful imagery. Instead, this book seems ready made for some action packed blood soaked Hollywood movie. I guess I just expect more from a writer of this caliber.

Cormac McCarthy in his current novel NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN distills all that was fine in his previous novels, siphoning off the rambling verbal romance with the countryside, and keying in on character in a manner far more successful than ever. His language is so pungent and spare while saying volumes that this book could literally be turned into a script for a film without much doctoring. He tells a fascinatingly gory tale of crime in the realm of drug trafficking along the border of Texas and Mexico, a story so vividly painted in words that the reader may feel the need to turn the head aside to avoid the gruesome details, and yet excellent as this narrative is, the main punch that makes this novel so fine is the use of italicized musings by one old Sheriff Bell who reflects on the changes in his hometown and in the resultant spirit of mankind which seems to be heading toward destruction of society as we know (or have known) it.

The story involves youngish welder Lewellyn Moss who happens across murdered bodies and cars, finding an obvious heroin deal gone bad, the money for the payoff (some 2+ million dollars) left behind in a bag. In a moment of fate Moss decides to take the money and run, telling only his wife of his plans. How he proceeds through the chase by special agents and one evil plunderer who kills everything in his path that deters his seizing the money is the grisly bulk of the story. No sooner do we meet characters than they are killed - and the path of death spreads out like a plague from the intial site of the drug deal.

This is as descriptive and entrancing a crime novel as you will find, but that doesn't seem to be McCarthy's driver. A consummate storyteller, he pauses at various times during this story to allow the reader to breathe and during each entr'acte he places words in the language of Bell that muse on how war changes men, how decisions made spontaneously can cripple the mind for life, and how the current (set in the 1980s) climate has become so violent that salvation may not be feasible. The wisdom falls simply out of the mouths of the old men: "You think when you wake up in the morning yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?" And on the subject of war: "I was too young for one war and too old for the next one. But I seen what come out of it. You can be patriotic and still believe that some things cost more than what they're worth. Ask them Gold Star mothers what they paid and what they got for it. You always pay too much. Particularly for promises. There aint no such thing as a bargain promise....I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didnt. I dont blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me he does."

Cormac McCarthy's ease of writing here makes this particular novel utterly irresistible. Few writers can match the naturalness of his prose and poetry of his content. In this reader's opinion, this is McCarthy's finest achievement. Recommended without reservation. Grady Harp, August 05

My bottom line assessment of "old Men" is one of disappointment. Perhaps a lost opportunity on McCarthy's part. So let me explain. The first 250 pages of McCarthy's latest are rapid fire bullets (literally) of plot, action, killings, as we join in a fast paced chase. Our lead protagonist is Moss who while hunting in the desert uncovers the aftermath of a drug buy gone wrong. He finds eight dead and some 2 million in cash. Moss who had been a sniper in Vietnam decides takes the money and run. He returns home and then returns to the scene (big mistake). Thus the novel takes off with rapid page turning dialog written in McCarthy's no punctuation style. And this works. So now everyone is chasing Moss and his 19 year old wife (we don't learn that Moss is 39 until late in the book).
I really enjoyed the book as the whole action chase and fast pace surprised me having read McCarthy's Boarder trilogy. The action only slows down with an introduction to each chapter with the county sheriff Bill's self analysis, philosophical monologs (in italics) where Bill appears to represent the old man of the title. The sheriff tries to rescue Moss and his wife by getting them to turn in the money before the "evil" doers catch up. (Yes there is a one dimensional villain but what a great villain he is.) So far so good, this is at least a terrific and exciting page turner. Very entertaining despite the number of corpses left on the streets of small Texas towns. I'm thinking this may not be a great novel like my real favorite All the Pretty Horses buy at least it is a well written beach read.
But then somewhere around page 250 the book comes to a complete halt and there are 50 more pages to go. You discover there is no more action, no more plot, and no more villain, as all we are left with is a confusing and very uninteresting monolog by Sheriff Bill. All right I get it. This country is so violent, unfair, that no one can tame it. So Sherriff Bill who is now our main character ups and quits and walks away leaving behind a violent country.
I can only come up with one thought which could explain this truncated ending. That perhaps this is but Part one of a two volume work. If not, this volume is all the more disappointing because of the high energy of the books first 250 pages. So my recommendation is to wait and read this only if you discover for a fact that McCarthy has a volume two. Otherwise I am afraid you will be disappointed as I was. And if there is a volume two I will be one of the first to buy it!

Like all of the McCarthy works I've read, this is a suberbly written, raw and stunningly violent novel. It is also, unlike especially his masterpiece Blood Meridian, a quick and easy (which does not mean comfortable or comforting) read: a thriller with a rigorous plot and pace.

I won't repeat details that have already been included in other reviews, but did think one point worth mentioning that I haven't seen in the other reviews. One feature of this novel that stands out are the continual references to the novelty of the criminals that the "old men" of the novel (especially Sheriff Bell) are facing. Their cold, clinical brutality that operates with no concern for the law -- here in the context of drug trafficking -- is something that Bell seems to think is entirely new. What is noteworthy, though, is that in the context of McCarthy's work this is not new at all (I am thinking especially of Blood Meridian). I think that is an indication that we shouldn't simply or easily identify McCarthy's point of view as author with the narrative voice of Sherrif Bell (who is clearly at the center of this story, though for a time displaced by Llewelyn). While for Bell this is all new, I think that McCarthy's work is saying that brutality (at the heart of war and violence, as these reveal themselves to be not reducible to utility, but as a kind of end in themselves for at least some of their participants) has always been with us and is apparently inescapable. There are those who kill without remorse -- and the morbid fascination that we as a culture have for such beings indicates that what drives them is not entirely alien to any of us. What he is exploring in his various works, I think, are the various ways in which one might confront and respond to this fact.

This novel presents one such response: Sheriff Bell does see into the abyss here, and while others may shrug off his own sense of guilt, he knows he cannot simply dismiss the horror of the abyss because he sees affinities with evil in his own instinctive act of self-preservation during wartime. Still, in his sometimes rambling italicized discussions, we see one genuine alternative to admitting the dominance of a horror that really can never be wholly overcome. It is to give oneself over to the fragile and risky bonds of trust and love and the always impermanent efforts of people (not laws) to institute order and protect the innocent.

Along those lines, it strikes me that in spite of vast differences in style and approach (most notably Rowling's tendency to say far more than is necessary contrasts with McCarthy's leanness of prose), this novel converges very closely in its subject matter and conclusions with the book I just finished reading with my kids: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. What makes Harry (compare Sheriff Bell) different from Voldemort (who, as revealed in the Half Blood Prince, is not so far from the chilling criminal Chigurh at the center of this novel) is not any greater skill he possesses (he doesn't and is in fact not entirely disciplined) but the fact he is willing to rely on others who he knows are better than him in some things, cares more about friendship than personal gain, and is (for the most part, though imperfectly) driven to protect others rather than out of any desire to be perceived heroic.

Note: This review will be short of plot details in order to avoid spoiling the book for those who have not read it yet.

No Country for Old Men is a deceptive novel. The et up is quite simple: a `good ole boy' Type named Moss comes across the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Moss was simply out hunting, and stumbles into something like good luck. On the scene he finds millions of dollars (which he takes) and a lot of heroin (which he doesn't). Moss runs knowing that the owners of the drugs and money will be coming for him.

From that beginning one would expect an adventure story. CM gives us something very different. We are presented with dueling narratives: Moss' story and the that of a sheriff who becomes involved with the case after one of his deputies is killed by Chigurh (the primary villain in the story).

The tale is almost hyper-violent and very bleak. It is a tale of violence and alienation. No Country for Old Men is a very modern tale (unlike CM's earlier works).

WE follow Moss and Chigurh on their vicious journey. Chigurh is perhaps the most dangerous sociopath ever to appear in American Literature. He is a villain as twisted as Hannibal Lecter, but more frightening because he is so much more plausible.

The book zips along (like a crime novel), but manages to make larger points about the world we inhabit.

The prose is beautiful. If you aren't familiar with CM's other novels it may seem odd. He is verbose, but also clipped in his usage. He gives us long, florid sentences punctuated with many fragments. He also tends to create new compounds from words that may commonly fall next to each other. These conceits actually add to the flow of his prose.

For those readers who have discovered CM's work due to The Road: this novel is much darker and more bleak than that one. While The Road offers the suggestion of some hope, No Country for Old Men does not.

This book is a required read.

Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" is set on the Texas-Mexican border, and his description of the desolate, raw, and forbidding landscape serves as the perfect backdrop for the catastrophic events that ensue. This is a good vs. evil narrative with an allegorical component. The good is exemplified by Sheriff Bell, a man of integrity whose musings appear throughout the book in italics. He served in World War II, is devoted to his beloved wife, Loretta, and now tries to keep the peace in his normally quiet county.

Everything changes one day when a welder named Llewelyn Moss comes upon a scene of carnage while hunting antelope near the Rio Grande. It seems that a drug deal involving Mexican black tar, a type of heroin, went terribly wrong. Instead of going home and reporting the incident to the police, Moss decides to take a case filled with millions of dollars. He soon finds out that he has brought a heap of trouble on himself and his wife, Carla Jean.

The elusive Anton Chigurh, a one-man execution squad, represents evil. He is after Moss, not only to retrieve the drug money, but also to punish Moss for having the temerity to inconvenience him. Chigurh is a man who murders anyone who gets in his way, and he sometimes kills people for no reason at all. He calmly tells one victim, "When I came into your life, your life was over." This insidiously brilliant and remorseless sociopath is like a ghost. He appears and disappears at will, and he remains, at all times, several steps ahead of the hapless authorities.

"No Country for Old Men" is about a nation that has lost its moral center. Bell represents the old fashioned values of integrity, hard work, community, and compassion that have helped make America such a great country. Chigurh represents a new culture of narcissism, greed, isolation, self-gratification, and violence. After seeing the result of this criminal's sadistic handiwork, Bell is almost at a loss for words.

The cryptic writing style is unusual and it takes some getting used to. Eschewing quotation marks completely, the author has Moss, the sheriff, and others speak in their native Southern dialects, complete with misspellings and incorrect grammar, and McCarthy often switches from one character to another without the normal transitions. Fortunately, he includes some passages in the third person that help clarify the plot to some extent. However, much more is implied than is stated, and the reader must work hard to make sense of it all.

McCarthy's understated eloquence, sharply delineated characters, and weighty themes lend "No Country for Old Men" undeniable power and resonance. This novel is an allegory for the sickness of our times, when the fabric of American society has been torn to shreds in so many ways. A reporter asks Sheriff Bell, "How come you let crime get so out of hand in your county?" He answers, "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners." The author makes us think about many things in addition to bad manners, such as fate, luck, the unfortunate choices we make, religious belief, and death. It's a heavy load for one book, but McCarthy's thoughtfulness and unique vision make it work.

This is a good book. However.... I don't know. It starts out really
good & then it goes South around page 250 or so. I guess maybe it had to do w/ the 1st 3/4 of the book is more of a thriller mixed w/ the sheriff's moral messages. Then towards the end it's just the sheriff's message about society today (we are going to hell in a handbasket). Which might be okay, but he doesn't really say anything new or thought provoking & just goes on w/ his homespun philosophy. The ending just didn't do it for me. Maybe I was expecting more.

My main gripe is the big climax is dealt w/ "off page." VERY annoying.

Some people may not like that McCarthy does not use quotation marks to identify dialogue & omits some punctuation. This didn't bother me. However my friend that read it, found this very distracting.

Being a 4th generation Texan it kinda bugged me how the dialogue made people in Tx sound like idiots. I get it, but it got soooooo old. I reckon people reading this think all Texans talk like this, but really we don't...

The story kicks off with Moss, who accidentally stumbles upon the scene of a drug deal gone bad while out hunting, and discovers bodies everywhere as well as a case containing $2.4 million. Moss takes off with the case, setting off a pursuit by Bell, an old sheriff who is trying to catch the bad guys but also trying to keep Moss out of harms way, as well as by Chigurgh, a hit man who is relentlessly tracking Moss to get the money back and to enforce his own evil code of justice.

I am conflicted about this book and struggling to explain why. Just coming off reading The Road (which I loved) and anticipating the movie made by the Coen Brothers, my expectations were high. Perhaps too high. While I loved the sparse, bullet fire narrative style, I grew weary of Bell's reflections. I found parts of the book to be brilliant and riveting, while others bored me. Portions of the book were well developed, while others dropped me flat with little to no explanation as to what just happened. I might need to go back and re-read the book, perhaps skipping Bell's prose which dragged on for pages. Chigurh is certainly fascinating, if not blood chilling. I will never look at a coin toss in the same way. Did I like this book? I'm really not sure. It certainly is not for everyone. But it continues to haunt me, that's for sure.

This is a good book. However.... I don't know. It starts out really
good & then it goes South around page 250 or so. I guess maybe it had to do w/ the 1st 3/4 of the book is more of a thriller mixed w/ the sheriff's moral messages. Then towards the end it's just the sheriff's message about society today (we are going to hell in a handbasket). Which might be okay, but he doesn't really say anything new or thought provoking & just goes on w/ his homespun philosophy. The ending just didn't do it for me. Maybe I was expecting more.

My main gripe is the big climax is dealt w/ "off page." VERY annoying.

Some people may not like that McCarthy does not use quotation marks to identify dialogue & omits some punctuation. This didn't bother me. However my friend that read it, found this very distracting.

Being a 4th generation Texan it kinda bugged me how the dialogue made people in Tx sound like idiots. I get it, but it got soooooo old. I reckon people reading this think all Texans talk like this, but really we don't...

What has Cormac McCarthy been doing in the many years since the completion of his masterpiece, the Border Trilogy? Perhaps watching the films of Sam Peckinpah and reading Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, if his latest book is any indication. McCarthy is such a wildly original writer that this chase thriller is his first novel to fit neatly into any literary genre. As far as the thriller part goes, it is compulsively readable, although so disturbingly violent I needed to put it down for minutes at a time. The writing is McCarthy at his most spare, doom-laden, and laconic ever, although he invests more energy than usual into making us care about the fates of his characters: Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam vet who stumbles onto a drug deal gone bad and staggers away with a suitcase containing $2.4 million, fatally conflicted between pride, greed, and conscience; his equally stubborn young wife, Carla Jean; and Sheriff Ed Joe Bell, a man not as virtuous as he would have the world believe. They are menaced by a variety of baddies, particularly the sociopathic, seemingly unstoppable Anton Chigurh, who may or may not be as smart and invulnerable as he thinks.

This novel has already been pounded by a few critics, unfairly, I think. Some have particularly objected to the crotchety, conservative social criticism voiced by Sheriff Bell. Bell notes how the ultra-violent world he lives in seems to be a new phenomenon (presumably, the sheriff has not read McCarthy's Blood Meridian). I cannot say to what extent McCarthy shares these views, but the reader should take them with at least a grain of salt, particularly in view of the revelations about the sheriff at the novel's end. McCarthy is as capable as any writer since Herman Melville of burying his opinions and intentions beneath layers of irony.

McCarthy also has been criticized for his problems with women, which seems strange to me as this book contains some of his best-realized female characters.

This book succeeds brilliantly as suspenseful entertainment, while subverting some conventions of the genre. Its themes of faith, loss, promises kept and broken, the depravity of human nature, and the irretrievability of decisions are of a piece with McCarthy's previous work. Just because it is more commercial than his other writings does not negate its many fine qualities.

"The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man's head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hands with his handkerchief. I just didn't want you to get blood on the car, he said."

And so we are introduced to Anton Chigurh - pronounced like sugar - and his slaughter house killing weapon of choice. "No Country for Old Men" does not get any gentler as the story moved through its 300+ pages. In the end Chigurh, Sheriff Bell and his wife Loretta are still alive while most of the other characters have met violent, graphic death.

Having read most of Mr. McCarthy's books, "Blood Meridian" as opposed to the trilogy always seemed to me the most violent, graphic and soul rending. That was until I read this one. It is a sparse masterpiece portraying a world gone mad with narcotic's dealers warring amongst themselves and collateral damage right and left. The descriptions of the characters are set in the same prose as the descriptions of Texas. You can get out your map and follow the action from El Paso to Houston and San Saba to Eagle Pass. I've driven all those roads and the descriptions are spot on.

This book is a fantastic read. But, be warned, once you pick it up you will NOT want to put it down. I didn't!

I am writing this review based on the genre it masters. McCarthy has always straddled the noir mystery/thriller genre over the arc of his career. However, this is by far the furthest he has ventured into the world of this oft maligned sub category of fiction. What comes out through McCarthy's prodigious gift for prose is perhaps the very best book this genre has ever seen.

In my opinion, this is McCarthy at his very best. Often when you read his books, his prose gets lost as your mind wanders through the visions he creates as an author. Its a curious effect in that his writing style has always been sparse. However, here... the tension that McCarthy creates is so vivid and alive that you as a reader will find find yourself ratcheted to every word, almost unable to put the book aside. Myself, I was up til almost dawn, unwilling to stop reading until I found how this story would unfold.

This writing harks back to one of my favorite genre writers of the 60's and 70's, Jim Thompson. The style is very similar. He wrote such masterpieces as 'The Killer Inside Me', and 'the Grifters'. Only McCarthy takes Thompson and manages to add another level. The dialog here is intermittent, a lot of what occurs here is through the eyes of a single character out on his own, but when you come across it... I have never read better.

I have read thousands of mystery/thriller books in my day and a swath of contemporary fiction post Hemingway. This book is one that I will hold up as not just being the best McCarthy book I have read (high praise from one who loves McCarthy), but also one of the very best books hands down that I have had the joy to come across.

Its dark, sparse, gritty... if this appeals to you, don't hesitate, get this book.

Action is everything here, this book reads like a movie. My guess is that McCarthy wrote it to sell to Hollywood to make himself some dough. It certainly will translate well to the screen.

Like McCarthy's other books, this book is a portrayal of a Western code of living. Here we find what I call the "inscrutable man" -- Moss. Like many of McCarthy's male characters, Moss is tight-lipped, mysterious and stubborn. His wife feeds him his eggs and bacon and stays quiet. She cries over him, but does what he says and accepts the fate of his decisions. Cowboy-boots-and-few-words. There's a lot of it. That's part of what characterizes McCarthy's novels and makes them interesting, but enough can be enough. That said . . .

The Sheriff:

Is sympathetic and likeable (after all, he just wants to help Moss out). But the italicized passages of his moral digressions were not to my taste. I got the feeling McCarthy threw them in just to give the book some literary credential. It was bearable, but to a point. At the end of the book the Sheriff really gets self-absorbed; he and his father have the long conversation about "is life really worth it in the end?" and I wanted to roll my eyes, turn over and die. We've all read or seen this burned-out-Sheriff thing way too much, and there is no need to see more.

Chigurh:

Was brilliant. All that business about Fate and flipping coins was cool. This guy defines cold blooded.

An ending thought: this all began because the guy at the crime scene in the desert asked Moss for water. Moss decided to go back and shut the door for him as he sat in the car, to protect him from "los lobos" -- wolves. If that door had been shut when he got there, there would have been no story at all.

A book in the vein of pulp but oh so much better.

his reclusiveness makes mccarthy less known than other great american novelists, but for many critics, mccarthy is america's greatest living fiction writer. harold bloom has compared him to no less than herman melville.

i've always viewed mccarthy as more akin to faulkner, in terms of his focus on the disenfranchised, his geographic confines (american west) and the bleakness of his vision. also, both use biblical and religious language and imagery in their work.

for all my admiration of mccarthy, i've found past books both brilliant as well as difficult and extremely bleak. blood meridian, a stunning work, is so filled with violence that i could not pick up another mccarthy work for more than a year.

his latest -- No Country -- us intriguing and a boon for me in that it's the most accessible mccarthy novel I've read. it is set in relatively recent times and focuses on cops, criminals and relative innocents caught up in a drug deal gone bad. the first half of the book is stark, action-packed and fast-moving. the second half shifts pace abruptly as it contains little action and is a meditation on good & evil, accountability and fate seen thru the eyes of the novel's protagonist sheriff bell.

what i found most promising is what appears to be an attempt by mccarthy to make his message and vision more understandable. in addition, as dark as it is, i found it to be his most hopeful work.

i highly recommend it.

As much as I enjoyed the film version of this Cormac McCarthy novel, I left the theater with a number of questions about the plot and the characters. I found the novel itself to more than adequately address the gaps I had detected in the film. For one thing, the central character of Sheriff Bell (and what was motivating him) became much more developed. Also the central theme of the story, namely that drug cartels had gotten so large, powerful and rich that we are rapidly approaching the point when conventional law enforcement, especially those legendary Texas country sheriffs, is simply unequipped effectively to deal with them. The Wells character became much more understandable after reading the novel. And even Chigurh, the apparently sociopathetic almost robotic gunman, emerged with much greater clarity after reading the novel. McCarthy writes dialogue ("The Road" is another example) that is quite unique--it is flat as a pancake, very rapid fire, epigrammatic, and yet with the exception of Hemingway, comes the closest to capturing the way people actually speak (without the burden of trying to decipher Texas accents so prevalent in the film). So, the book enriches one's understanding of the film, adds some additional scenes not in the film (such as Moss confronting Chigurh face-to-face) and clears up the mystery of how Moss dies. On its own, the novel is a great story which grabs and holds the reader. Quite a yarn to say the least!

This review contains a mild SPOILER. Summary: I like the book. Get the audio version.

If the sign of a great work of Fiction is that it lingers in your thoughts long after you've read it, then "No Country For Old Men" is great.

But, my experience with this novel leaves me unsure of that generalization.

Here's what I do know. Cormac McCarthy's prose is terse, violent, engaging, folksy, and deviously enjoyable. His characters are drawn convincingly enough to instill in you the sense that they are walking the Earth. And he dread that the world they live in is ours, too. His villain, Anton Chugyr, opens his mouth, and a cold wind blows into you- and you can't stop reading.

As I look through the the store reviews, and talk with friends who have also read the book, I sense that most readers, accustomed to three-act story lines will be jolted by the unconventional narrative structure of the novel: There's no payoff... It's too short. There's no dessert... I want to know what really happened. What does it all mean?

As the novel progresses through spare prose and dialog, McCarthy seems to be setting us up for a classic showdown. Instead, he brutally yanks us from a path that seemed straight and clear and confronts us with cold, meaningless death. There's a dizzying shift in who we imagine to be the protagonist.

As I puzzle over this shift, the joys of the novel seem to be in individual scenes- mostly involving Anton Chugyr. There's the one where Chugyr torments a confused convenience store owner. And there's the one where Chugyr coolly explains the futility of a hitman's attempts to talk his way out of his own murder. And the one where Chugur asks the man to step away from the car, just so that he wouldn't get blood on it when he was killed. And there's more.

Whether or not all these parts add up to a greater whole is something I've yet to puzzle out. Moreover, I'm toying with the idea that Stick-with-you-ness might simply be a sign of a reader's frustration, or confusion, or puzzlement. Then again, it may be the hallmark of great art. Unexamined life and all that.

So, is there something more?

Like me, you may not be able to figure it out. Or you may decide that McCarthy didn't know either and just wanted to get some semblance of an ending committed to writing. Whatever the case, the journey through this story will hold fast your attention and exhilarate your devious, adventurous side.

I "read" the audio version of the book, and found Tom Stechshulte's voice to be the perfect vehicle for the dialog of the male characters. All his women sounded the same.

After seeing the film, and being disappointed (see my the store review), I figured the novel might be better. It was.

As I interpret it, the title refers to the idea that, if one lives long enough, one reaches a point where society changes to the extent that we no longer understand it, and/or we recognize that the way we perceived the world when younger was wrong, or doesn't make sense.

For Sheriff Bell, who in his 36 years as a law officer has seen nothing much "worse" than simple murder, it's the rise of the drug trade and the horrifying crimes committed by those dealing in it. Not to mention people renting rooms to the elderly, then murdering them for their Social Security checks -- /after/ torturing them. "Maybe their television was broke", Bell drily observes.

NCfOM is neither a crime drama nor a thriller (though constructed as such). It is Bell-McCarthy's musings on the chickens coming home to roost -- of the brutal materialism of our society -- primarily its depraved greed -- finally destroying it. This is implicit throughout the book, but McCarthy makes it clear (if you weren't paying attention) when Bell converses with a prosecutor:

...I asked him if he knew who Mammon was. And he said: Mammon?
Yes. Mammon.
You mean like God and Mammon? *
Yessir.
Well, he said, I can't say as I do. I know it's in the bible. Is it the devil?
I don't know. I'm goin to look it up. I got a feelin I ought to know who it is.
He kindly smiled and he said: You sound like he might be getting ready to take up the spare bedroom.
Well, I said, that would be one concern. In any case I feel I need to familiarize my self with his habits.

Moss is eventually punished for taking the money, for putting material things above the spiritual. This is fated, and the weapon of destruction is the fate-worshipping Anton Chighur.

I could go on, but this is a "philosophical" book that largely avoids pretentiousness and excessive self-awareness. It's worth reading; you'll probably want to get friends to read it, so you can discuss it.

And it's a book high-school English teachers should assign. It would provoke an incredible amount of worthwhile discussion.

* "No man can serve two masters... Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." (Literally, the deific personification of wealth. Figuratively, material things.)

Llewelyn Moss finds money and guns, including a submachine gun. He wants his wife, Carly Jean, to go to Odessa to wait for him. He feels at least two groups of people are looking for him, not including various law enforcement officials. He uses two motels to stay ahead of everyone. He alters a Winchester shotgun in anticipation of a fight. The care he takes, the planning, reminds the reader of Ernest Hemingway's characters preparing to go hunting or fishing. One is also reminded of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE in terms of the author's use of descriptive detail to show carnage.

The bodies at the site of Llewelyn Moss's discovery of the money and the guns are seen by Sheriff Bell and others. It is determined they have been there for four or five days. Heroin is found in the back of the vehicle. Texas Rangers are on the way to the scene. Moss finds the sending unit, the transponder, in the packs of money. He reflects to himself that he has been running on luck. He anticipates that someone like Anton will enter his room by stealth, but he hasn't factored in that Anton is a crack shot and highly motivated to injure him. Moss is hit at least three times and retreats to a hospital in Mexico. The sheriff warns Carla Jean that her husband is in an extremely dangerous position.

Cormac McCarthy begins his work with the promising notion of an everyman encountering a stash of money, drugs, and guns, seemingly his for the taking. The problem is that criminals, of all people, don't like being inconvenienced and they certainly don't like being crime victims. In the end one character, a man who seeks to prevent injury, comes to question his own capacity to pursue his vocation.

This was the first of 4 books by Cormac McCarthy that I bought and read. Of these, this one was the better of the bunch. Good storyline. You are rooting for the good guy and you keep wondering if he's going to get away with it. The backgrounds of two of the main characters, Moss and Chigurgh leave a lot to be desired. Would have been nice to know a little more about their backgrounds. As for the Sheriff, well, he could have been totally left out of the book and it wouldn't have mattered. He was pretty much useless in crime solving or prevention. He just had some good ol' homegrown sayings and wisecracks. Don't even know why he was included. The story moves along at a pretty good pace but there are some things that occur in the story that leaves the reader a little confused. I still don't know who the owner of the drugs and money was or how the Mexicans always beat Chigurgh to Moss. You won't like the ending either by the way. I saw the movie after reading the book and if I were to review the movie, it would pretty much be the same as this review of the book.

When Llewelyn Moss, an apparently simple hunter, discovers a truck, several dead men, a load of heroin, and 2.3 million dollars in the middle of the Texan desert, a bloody hunt begins that ends in the violent deaths of nearly every character in the book, minus the good Sheriff and his wife. Don't become too attached to anyone, as they may not last to the next page... Although their language is simple and accurately reflects the Texas setting, both Moss and the Sheriff are complex characters shaped by an austere environments as well as their experiences in the Vietnam War. Moss might appear to be a country bumpkin/hunter, but his sniper training during the war created a crafty and resilient personality. The Sheriff speaks simply as well but McCarthy's examination of his thoughts shows us a complex and sophisticated character.
McCarthy's prose, reminiscent of Hemingway, captures the spirit of the modern-day West. Writing in both the first and third person, McCarthy shifts from one mind to another, at once in the thoughts and memory of his main character, the Sheriff, the methodical thoughts of Moss, then in the psychotic mind of Anton Chigur. Chigur is perhaps the most disturbing character, a deadly killer who dispatches his victims with a cattle-killing stun gun that serves double duty as a battering ram to open any normal lock. Chigur begins as a simple psychotic but becomes more and more complex through the book, eventually becoming something of an Angel of Death who decides fates based on the toss of a coin. Chigur's own fate rests on the whims of destiny.
The deadly mix of desperate men, a lost load of heroin, and 2.3 million dollars makes for a fascinating and unsettling read. Don't open this book unless you have the time to read it from cover to cover!

After watching the film version of this book, I decided to go back and dig deeper by reading the novel. I'm glad I did.

"No Country for Old Men" is stripped-down storytelling, sparse in punctuation and narrative, giving the tale a raw rhythm that I found amazing. Slipped in between scenes of chilling action, we get glimpses into the introspective reflections of a sheriff who has to deal with the aftermath of changing morals--and lack thereof. Some readers seem to find those passages boring, whereas I found them to be great commentaries on a shifting mindset in our society.

The story itself is reflected accurately (for the most part) in the film. Moss, a tough-minded man who never backs down from a challenge, finds himself in possession of over two million dollars after stumbling upon a vicious scene in the desert. Soon, he is being hunted by a man with no remorse. Chigurh is a ruthless creation, one that McCarthy pulls off to amazing effect. As Moss and Chigurh's paths veer toward a confrontation, others pay the price by getting in the way.

The movie varied on some minor elements, but each of those elements annoyed me in the movie. While the film is done masterfully on many levels, that string of inconsistencies left me frustrated by the end. The book, on the other hand, does not make those missteps. It gives us more info where we need it, and doesn't try to manufacture the false suspense (such as Chigurh behind the hotel room door) that the movie attempted.

After reading the equally sparse, yet hopeful, "The Road," I find myself as moved by McCarthy's ability in this bone-chilling story with a moral thread that tries to find purchase through the sheriff's voice. It's time for me to go back and explore more of this writer's intriguing voice.

If the American west was wild in the past, Cormac McCarthy is out to show us it's even more violent today.

Some, perhaps many, readers will be appalled by the violence and lack of humanity in "No Country For Old Men." Sheriff Bell, whose comments in italics alternate between chapters which carry the tale, seems to be an attempt to explain how that came to be.

Unlike his Border Trilogy (which, truth be said, had its share of violence), this is a darker tale of what happens to a people and a society when the worship of money replaces humanity.

The struggle between good and evil begins when Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam vet, stumbles onto carnage in the desert and makes off with more than $2 million in cash owned by drug traffickers. Maybe deep down Moss knows he is putting himself and his young wife at risk. But, tempted by Mammon, he believes he is smart and tough enough to outwit the criminals. Sheriff Bell knows Moss is up against more than he bargained for and he does his best to save the young man. Unfortunately, he, too, is outflanked.

The villains are legion and the worst of them is a psychotic killer named Anton Chigurh. In Chigurh, McCarthy has created a villain matched by few in fiction.

The redeeming qualities in this book are McCarthy's elegant style and his insight into character and a story that is as engrossing as it is disturbing.

It is said that when the nineteenth-century Spanish General Narvaez was asked on his deathbed if he forgave his enemies, his response was: 'I have none. I have had them all shot.' Towards the end of Cormac McCarthy's novel, when hired gun Anton Chigurh declares: 'I have no enemies. I don't permit such a thing', the same thing is meant. [p. 253]

Chigurh is a killer pursuing trailer-trash Texan Llewllyn Moss. Moss has stumbled upon a drug deal gone wrong whilst out hunting antelope one day. A trail of dead bodies leads him to a briefcase with a seven-figure sum of cash in it. Moss decides to run off with the loot: the chase begins. In the background, ageing sherrif Tom Bell laments the whirlpool of violence he has thus been sucked into. His thoughts and reminiscences crenelate the sequence of chapters, providing what is meant to be the moral centre of the book.

I bought this book for two reasons. Reviews indicated that it was both an excellent thriller, and a story that had a moral undergirding. In summary: it had a good plot and it left you with something to think about.

As a thriller, the book is certainly superior to nearly anything you'd see on the shelves these days. It moves at a cracking, almost impatient pace and hardly lags for a moment. But one could scarcely say that the McGuffin driving the plot is original. A stolen/pursued briefcase (typically full of cash) has been done to death before in novels and films such as Psycho, What's Up Doc, Pulp Fiction, Ronin, A Simple Plan, and (surprise, surprise) Fargo.

Anton Chigurh is the main character in a book with no heroes. Although he is an arch-villain, it's fairly plain that McCarthy has not written him with the intention that the reader should despise him. Rather, his aura is one of awe-inspiring turpitude, and his image is consecrated with all the most ruthlessly cool dialogue and scene-stealing moments. While dispatching a victim 'Chigurh shot him three times so fast it sounded like one long gunshot' [p. 103]; after he climbs seventeen flights of stairs he is 'breathing no harder than if he'd just got up out of a chair' [p. 198]; moments after being blasted from a distance by Chigurh, Moss says to himself: 'Damn, what a shot.' [p. 114] Even his victims admire him: this is Anton Der Ubermensch.

But Chigurh's character has been sketched too hurriedly. The much-misunderstood word 'psychopath' is hurled about. Anyone familiar with the writings of Dr. Robert Hare on the issue would know that most diagnosable psychopaths are not luridly violent, merely ruthlessly unprincipled and self-serving. Yet on p. 141 we have Carson Wells (whom seems to know Chigurh better than anyone else in the book) profiling him as 'psychopathic' and then twelve pages later telling Moss that 'You could even say that he has principles.' That's just lazy.

So awful is Chigurh that his moral surroundings must be correspondingly lowered: half the people he kills are themselves criminals, and his main nemeses are a sheriff with a dark past (Bell) and a thief and manslaughterer (Moss, who manages to unknowingly shoot an old lady [see p. 151]). This backdrop serves the dual purpose of (i) not making Chigurh look too cartoonishly evil; and (ii) not alienating this chicly fascinating killer from the reader too much. Thus, one gets the impression that in creating Chigurh McCarthy first and foremost set out to deliberately create an impressively amoral black hole in human form, but then allowed the gravitational field exerted by him to morally distort the characters around him. That smacks of poor discipline.

Despite these cavils, however, the book is written with a wonderfully laconic style that makes for very brisk and engrossing reading. Where many other authors would have gone into distracting descriptions of the largely irrelevant, McCarthy has been wisely economic with the details. The plot ends in a bizarrely unsatisfactory way, and it's not clear what sort of lesson we're meant to draw from it all. Thus one could say that the story lacks a moral. And morals.

I picked this book up at the library after seeing a preview of the upcoming movie starring Tommy Lee Jones. Therefore as I read the face and voice of Tommy Lee Jones became a part of the book -- which might have actually helped me get into this.

As others have summarized the story, it is way violent, brutal, depressing, and cold. However, there are some real jewels of wit, compassion, and wisdom scattered throughout. The one thing that made me give this a 4 rather than 5 was the sometimes too lengthy and detailed description of guns and weapons. I don't have a clue about one gun from the next; however, I'm sure someone more familiar with this would appreciate this.

This is not my favorite book of all time, but I'm glad I read it. It's a fast paced crime/detective novel that is well written and has some places that are impossible to put down. I'm anxiously awaiting the movie.

Anton Chigurh (especially as played by the film adaptation's Javier Bardem) will be 2007's most terrifying antagonist. His soulless demeanor, exceeding efficiency at killing and single-minded focus on his interests combine to make him a danger whose proportion cannot accurately be described. What is more terrifying is that with today's news headlines, his character is utterly believable.

The story that takes place in this lawless American province is age-old but straight out of the Old Testament world. Mammon is the culprit as a small-town Joe takes a bag of dirty money he shouldn't have and unleashes an unrelenting, unfeeling and unstoppable killer who wants it back. In their wake is the county sheriff, a good man trying to believe in mankind's inherent goodness despite evidence to the contrary at every turn, who suffers a Job-like test of faith. The resulting story is grim and numbingly violent...but no longer far-fetched. It is something you might see on CNN in the evening.

"No Country for Old Men" is unsettling within the first seven pages. It is a well-written book, quite literally a page-turner that demands to be read. The story of ill-gotten gains is a Trial of Job that in the end has a new twist. Not everyone has their faith rekindled, and that part of the tale is as harsh as its Texas desert setting. In this riveting story is a hinted message, best elucidated by Llewelyn Moss' father, which is the author's reasoning on how this country may have arrived at the state described in the book and where it is headed.

This book is a high recommendation for the readers who love the constant flow of action. It will keep you on the edge of your seat wondering if the character will come out a live. It shows great detail of what is happening with each character. It allows you to imagine with your own mind of what is happening. It has no need for excessive detail because Corman McCarthy writes the perfect amount to give you an idea of his world in the world of “No Country For Old Men”. The statement from Washington Post says it all, "Profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered...The most accessible of all his works." Truly Cormanc McCarthy gives us the dark details of his characters. We are able to understand their positions and where they come from. Another quote from New York Times says, " Riveting...A harrowing, propulsive drama, cutting from one frightening, violent set piece to another with cinematic economy and precision." It hits the heart with the dark twist. What gives this man the right to live? That is the question you will be asking throughout the book. I myself was left in awe. I couldn't believe it. I compared this book with his other works "The Road". I believe it to be alike. Riveting and gorgeous.

The strength of this novel is the compelling crime story depicting the violent aftermath of a botched drug deal near the Mexican border. Moss, a good-hearted welder, stumbles across over two million dollars in drug money, and his impulsive decision to grab the money puts a quick end to the quiet trailer park life he leads with his fetching young wife. A hit man named Chigurh, whose bottomless evil reaches Satanic proportions, tracks Moss relentlessly, creating a riveting cat-and-mouse thriller that keeps you flying through the pages.

Interspersed throughout the story, however, are various introspective passages told from the point of view of County Sheriff Bell, an older man whose limitless goodness and patriarchal approach to law enforcement is meant to serve as a dichotomy to Chigurh's extreme badness. (In that sense, neither the Sheriff nor Chigurh is a very believeable character, seeming instead to serve as stand-ins for God and Satan.) Toward the end of the story, Bell's ruminations on the dire moral climate of the United States become more and more frequent, until the crime story line abruptly disappears and the reader is left with pages and pages of reactionary polemic in the closing chapters.

Don't get me wrong, McCarthy does many things exceptionally well in this novel; his unadorned writing style and blue collar dialogue are truly masterful. I just wish he had toned down the rhetoric and instead spent his energy on constructing a more interesting way to end this story. I'll be curious to see how the film adaptation dealt with the anti-climactic ending.

Cormac McCarthy's excellent new Novel, "No Country for Old Men" is receiving generally outstanding reviews. That it is indeed a fine piece of work, should not assure readers that he is at his best here.

The Story: A lone hunter finds in the desert, the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. He arrives to find dead bodies, burnt out cars, and two million in cash. When he leaves the scene with the money, the story is in play. In a whirlwind of non stop action, the tragedy unfolds, and leads to its sad conclusion. Although different in style and content from previous work, it continues to explore violence, goodness, and godliness, themes which have pervaded his work almost from the beginning.

As in the earlier tales from the Border Trilogy, we have the adventurer, innocent of the role he plays. There are the Violent and Cruel, whose roles are less rather to bring any sense of justice, than to live out their legacy of barbaric cruelty. Lastly, there is "Chorus", here in the form of the gentle Sheriff, who between his crusade against evil, plays Thespian to the reader, a much used tactic in McMarthy's work.

Among the loyal group of readers who consider Cormack McCarthy's work unique and monumental, there is a larger segment that has shown marked indifference. How Unfortunate. McMarthy has found a way to integrate spellbinding storytelling, with a core belief that violence by man against man is neither caused, nor judged by God, and that the Lord is impassive in the face of evil. He who judges and acts is man himself, guided by a force within him; his own personal God or Devil.

What lessens this work is the relative absence of character development, which has shone so brightly in earlier work. "Blood Meridian", as violent and bloody a work in recent memory, pictures a man, (Judge Holden), as a supreme example of the Devil on Earth. Cruel beyond description, he was revealed nevertheless, as a man one felt as a real and compelling person. In The Border Trilogy , characters came alive with such force that a reader could feel a kinship, with even the minor people who drifted in and out of the scenarios.

"No Country for Old Men" is new McCarthy, this time a pulp fiction page turner, with twists, and even comic interludes. Missing however is the genius McCarthy can evoke when he records the plain and idiomaic speech of his actors, and which brings them so brightly to life.

In the end, McCarthy continues his assertion that God, or the Devil will reveal himself as he inhabits every man. Men are born, and grow, with God and truth in their bones, or soulless and depraved, and neither can be learned or instilled.

Film noir auteurs will have snapped up options on McCarthy's,'Old Men'; Sean Penn high in the queue. There's a perfect voice-over for the disillusioned, Sheriff Bell, the rapid scene shuffling about the Tex-Mex border, for most of us an exotic location shot, a seemingly endless spate of blood splashing around decrepit ,motels and desert dust, and the inexplicable, indestructible and immoral assassin, Anton Chigurh(pronounced, we're told,as 'Sugar'). It's,'Blood Meridian', a century on. The Judge, now dressed as Chigurh, with his horse traded for a high-powered four wheeler. In a country and a culture founded on violence, the sins of the grandfathers have been visited upon their descendants. Over this bleak course, the language of that culture, and of McCarthy, has been stripped to the bone, as if the author has capitulated from literature to film scripting. In this sense, the book might have been written by someone else. Lengthy passages have the stirring prosaic rhythm of merely recounting a scene's contents found in William Wharton, for instance. McCarthy's former poetic diction has been exhausted. The pessimism here, the despairing at the severed social contract, of problems insurmountable by agencies elected to protect their citizens from them, is indeed, as harrowing as the cover blurb claims.

This is a straight noir thriller - or as straight a thriller as Cormac McCarthy will ever write. He eschews his normally ornate prose and adopts a lean style. McCarthy retains his great ear for dialog, however, and that's the chief enjoyment in the book for me. The story is about a guy who takes some drug money off some dead fellows he comes across. An evil hit man follows him, while a fairly smart, good-hearted sheriff tries to do something about what is an impossible situation for him in his remote Texas jurisdiction. The sheriff has several sections of first person reflection on the state the world's come to (the book takes place around 1980, I think) and how things are just plain worse than they used to be by any measure. He speculates on the nature of evil, etc. You can't help but getting the idea, since the character of the sheriff is around McCarthy's age, and the title of the book suggests it, that the voice of the sheriff is the voice of McCarthy, trying to puzzle out just what the world's come to. It's fairly simple (but not simplistic) philosophical musing on good and evil, with none of the profound and sometimes mind-bending flourishes McCarthy has thoughtful or insane characters in other books take. Either way, McCarthy's reflection on the darkness of life are astute and often produce shivers of enlightenment to a more frightening reality, at least in this reader.

This book, which is not McCarthy's best (the dude is getting toward 80, I believe) served as an opportunity for a couple of critics to savage McCarthy in the New York Times and in the New Yorker. I suppose there inevitably has to be a backlash as obtuse critics who DIDN'T recognize McCarthy's genius in their youths now decide that, since they didn't like Cormac when Cormac wasn't cool, then he must not be cool after all. There was a particularly noisome screed in the New Yorker that I almost thought to be a parody of envious, condescending attack prose until I realized the bozo was serious. I can only imagine what he might have said about Melville after Pierre came out or the kind of crap he'd sling at a genius who wrote like Walt Whitman. I suppose this is the sort of fellow who likes books like The Hours. In any case, he'll soon be forgotten, and McCarthy is destined to take a place as one of the greats in the pantheon of American literature -- if not in our generation, then the next.

I am a great fan of Cormac McCarthy's writing, and "No Country for Old Men" is a strange novel, as his books almost always are. It is a gripping page-turner, and I finished it in three days, a fast read for me, but in the end I was disappointed.

The story has part openings in the voice of an undereducated Texas sheriff, with lots of double negatives, "ever" for "every" and "kindly" for "kind of," and "set" for "sit." The diction seemed a bit strained to me at times, but one critic called the book "The most accessible of all his works." I actually found the sheriff's philosophical ramplings impenetrable at times.

The plot involves a two-million-dollar drug deal gone awry and a Texas cowpoke named Llewelyn Moss stumbling onto the aftermath of a minor massacre and running off with a briefcase filled with the two million in cash. This cowpoke speaks with the same diction as the sheriff. He and his family are hunted down by a ruthless, cold-blooded killer named Chigurh, who speaks the best English.

Chigurh -- sounds kindly like sugar -- blows away Mexican drug dealers, lawmen, and anybody else who gets in his way, and represents, essentially, what the world has come to. It's too much for Sheriff Bell, who gives up the chase and retires, while Chigurh gets the money back and wreaks his usual havoc. The novel has been called "profoundly disturbing," I guess because the good guys get killed or quit and the bad guy gets away, after delivering the cash to an unidentified businessman in a fancy office.

Is this what our world has come to?

I saw the movie before even knowing it was inspired by this book. I loved the movie so I ran for the book!

The story told in the book is a great modern western-style tale very different from most fiction books I have read before. The main vilain is such a horrific character (like in the movie). The main idea of McCarthy's plot is simple but he develops it in a very efficient way.

I must admit I found the Sheriff's philosophic thoughts a bit long compared to the story. The main action between the hero and vilain could have been developed a bit more. Finally, the writing style is weird and often annoying (missing quotation marks to identify dialogue, weird sentences and punctuation...).

Occasionnal readers => the book is pretty short and easy to read compared to the average fiction book.

Anyway, 5 stars for the main story and 3 for the writing ;)

This book troubled me. It was the least interesting of all the McCarthy I've read.

Briefly, it is the story of a man, Llewelyn Moss, who is antelope hunting when he finds the after-effects of a drug deal gone bad. Llewelyn follows a blood trail that leads him to a dead man with a bag of money--some two million dollars. Llewelyn takes the money. And the bad guys chase him down.

On the surface, there's plenty to like about this book. Lots of talk about guns and cars. Horses. Lots of violence--though the violence is pretty pedestrian compared to some of McCarthy's other work. The men are simple and plain spoken and moral in a cowboy sort of way. It is a very readable book, and approachable for McCarthy.

The thing that bothers most people--the unexpected twist about half way through the book--didn't bother me at all. I have come to expect such things from McCarthy and I appreciate them. Were this twist to be anything different, it would undermine the premise of the book and be distinctly un-McCarthy.

But all in all, book feels unfinished. As though it is an early draft. It lacks the depth of his other work. There are moments that feel genuine--one of the final scenes, when the Sheriff visits his wheelchair bound uncle and confesses his cowardice in battle. This scene rings true. There are other moments. But taken as a whole it feels skeletal.

I've heard or read someplace that they are going to make a movie out of the book, and I can't help but wonder if that is part of it. Did McCarthy send the thing off before it was done? Was it written with a film script in mind? I don't know. I like to think that somebody like McCarthy is above such things, but now that he is rich and famous and getting on in years, you never know.

Sparse. Meditative. Blood soaked. These three descriptions best sum up No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy's modern vision of a western. The story is a good one - Llewelyn Moss stumbles across $2 million in cash near the Texas/Mexico border and finds himself in the middle of a drug war and the target of a Terminator-esque free-agent killer looking for the money. Eschewing punctuation and virtually any descriptive passages, McCarthy's sparse, lyrical prose takes some getting used to (as does the regional dialect), but once you find the rhythm you'll find yourself swept up in his blood soaked tale that is just as much a pageturning thriller as it is a meditative exploration of violence in contemporary America, good vs. evil, and the consequences of the choices we make in our lives. Read it before the Coen Brothers film comes out so you can impress all your friends. Recommended.

Ok while ill admit that this is a lot better written and far more interesting than most of the stuff on the bookshelves, it pales in comparasion to other mccarthy works. first it is a modern day, far more accessable version of blood meridian. judge-chirgugh, kid-moss.

also if you cant see all the other similarities look at the epilouge of both: bringing light into the darkness.

the problem is that blood meridian is an egregiously better book. more complex, more thought provoking, more multi-layered, and more interestingly written--again compare the two epilouges.

this book is quite linear. sherrif bells comments are rather trite and far from writing with ambiguious voice that has so completely illumitated his messages in the past, mccarthy hits the reader over the head with one fairly insipid idea here. its not appreciated.

basically no one read meridian or much of his better work before the trilogy so he dumbed everything down and packaged it within tried and true clancy (more time was expeded describing the myriad weaponry than to anything else--including all but a few of the characters) to achieve a fast reading but ultimately vapid effect.

I've read most of his other novels before this, but for this one I'd only seen the Coen brothers' movie from about five years ago. The prose is electric and within about 50 pages I'd forgotten the faces and scenes from the film.

This is an excellently written novel. McCarthy not only can plot a riveting story, but he creates characters that are strikingly believable. Some of the more evil ones can scare from the page. Like McCarthy's "The Road," many of these characters are loners who want to believe they are islands unto themselves, but find their lives intersecting with those of others. Many of the characters are unsavory, and with the possible exception of Sheriff Bell, I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with them, but nonetheless you are interested in the outcome of their lives. McCarthy is not, however, who ties everything up with a bow, but also readers will be hard pressed to say they saw the various endings of those lives coming. This one may not be for everybody, but I find McCarthy to be one of the best authors of his day along with James Lee Burke.

I hated The Road. But everyone is all "Cormac McCarthy is the greatest American writer!" and maybe I just wasn't giving him a fair chance. So I gave him another. I haven't seen the movie, but I decided to check out No Country for Old Men since it was relatively short.

McCarthy could grow on me. This book didn't have all the meandering and forced prose of The Road; indeed, it was sparse, clear writing, not at all what I was expecting. The story is a fairly simple one: a Texas good ol' boy out hunting comes across a drug deal gone bad, and decides to make off with the money. The rest of the story follows from that decision and from several other decisions he makes along the way. This is the "literary" angle that hooked me, the fact that every action each character took had definite and clear consequences, even if they weren't immediate. Moral consequences, albeit sometimes according to the alien morality of people like Anton Chigurh, the scary, implacable hit-man who stalks through every page of the book.

If you're at all familiar with McCarthy, you know not to expect rosy outcomes. There's a lot of death and the ending is bleak. I felt the tension went completely slack in the last couple of chapters, and we were left with just an old man grumbling about past mistakes and the state of the world. Also, Chigurh, indubitably the star of the book, was well-drawn but in very sketchy strokes. He's a grayscale figure who's there to scare you and deliver the coup de grace; he's an archetype, but there's really not that much there to him.

That aside, it's a great book if you like tight, sparse, masculine Westerns (which is pretty much what No Country for Old Men is, a noir Western set in the present). After being thoroughly unimpressed with the first book I read by Cormac McCarthy, the second one changed my opinion, and I'm now willing to read something else by him.

This is the story of a small town of simple people, "common as dirt," the narrator says, and he means that as a good thing, and what happens when hell comes down the road. Set along the Texas-Mexican border, the story starts when Llewelyn Moss, a welder by trade and hunter by hobby, finds in the desert amongst several bullet-riddled trucks, nine dead bodies, a trunk full of dope, and 2.4 million dollars in cash. He takes the cash, and his life and that of the town is turned inside out.

This book is a lament for the old days and the old ways. The simpler times. It is about what happens to kind, faithful, honest people when they face the real evils of the modern world. The odds are not favorable when good folks face off against men who kill for a living, and the good do not fare well. But Mccarthy juxtaposes the violence and death and darkness with simple, genuine love. The point it makes is neither simple nor particularly hopeful.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN moves like a pop crime novel, but is written and has the depth of great literature. As always, Mccarthy's description of the Texas landscape is poetic and his dialogue sharp and insightful. I read the book in two days and can't wait to see the movie.

This is an extraordinarily complex and nuanced novel masquerading as a shoot 'em up. Like other of McCarthy's stories, the novel is propelled by the reflexively violent nature of men operating outside social constraints. The particular millieu for this story is the drug trade, depicted as an evil force of nature that makes claims on the lives of all the characters. The dynamics of the story lead toward entropy. The central figure is a West Texas sheriff clinging to old concepts of honor, who must confront the facts of a case he cannot solve involving a merciless killer he can neither name nor understand. His inability to do his duty to the people of the county he is sworn to protect amplifies a lifelong sense of inadequacy and duplicity that is revealed through a continuing interior monologue. Without giving away any elements of the captivating and fast-moving plot, the message seems to be inescapably dark: evil is afoot in the world, and we lack the tools and the will to defeat it. Our only small victories come from love and trust and as much selflessness as we can muster.

The writing is extraordinary. McCarthy's style is of course mannered, but his words flow from the page and the voices of his characters are remarkably clear. The book is a delight to anyone who loves the language and loves to see it used well, and the story works on so many levels that it is difficult to imagine anyone -- apart from those who find violence offensive --who will not find something to take away from this novel.

I highly doubt McCarthy wrote this book with an intention of 'selling' it to Hollywood. If you know anything of the man you will know that money has NEVER interested him. I am only speculating but I think he wrote it because it must have been a lot of fun to write. It is certainly fun to read. I own all of his books and have read them several times. No Country is the one I turn to again and again because it is a unique offering from one of the greatest writers of all time. I believe if Faulkner had written a detective novel it would be similarly intriguing. The book is very much of a time and place, like all McCarthy's novels. Just because it happens to take the form of a crime novel doesn't make it any less important or significant a book than The Crossing, or The Road, for example.

If you have ever lived in or passed through West Texas, or southern New Mexico you get a feel for the harshness of it's physical and cultural geography. Regional and cultural Geography conditions it denizens. No Country for Old Men defines this geography and it's effects on the people who survive...and in some sense adapt to this harsh but beautiful region. Mccarthy's genius accurately designed the appropriate title of his story. I highly recommend this book for all the Mccarthy fans out there. Add this knowledge to your base of understanding the human condition. I did.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy's «No Country for Old men» before seeing the Coen brothers' film. It is the well told story of an ordinary man finding a briefcase full of drug money and how choosing to keep it will determine the rest of his life and that of his family. He is immediately pursued by Chigurh, a Terminator-like killing machine whose job it is to recover that money. A West Texas Sheriff close to retirement is the third protagonist of the chase. A loving husband and a good man, he tries to make sense of a changing world, the fibre of which is being destroyed by drugs. The worst evil to enter his county is the ressourceful and remorseless Chigurh, who sees himself as a moral man, engaging at times in philosophic discussions with his targets. Beyond the contract, he kills because he gave his word that he would; he sometimes allows a coin toss, although it is perhaps a fruitless exercise because he thinks a person's fate has been predetermined by the choices that person has made. Nothing a coin toss could change. A nihilistic moralistic sicko. I have also bought and read the bleakest of bleakest «The Road». Whenever we are cold and hungry, «the Road » will be a reminder that it could be much worse. McCarthy's writing is not seemless or cute. He is a gifted and important contemporary writer.

I decided to jump on the No Country For Old Men bandwagon since the film recently received great critical acclaim and I loved McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Road. This novel is every bit McCarthy's style. One example being the way he writes dialogue: with out quotation marks, straightforward conversations, and stylized dialogue reflecting the heavy southern accents. A majority of the book is in third person, with short chapters written from Sheriff Bell's perspective.

The plot is a fast-paced cat-and-mouse chase between Mexican drug dealers, the psychotic Anton Chigurh, hit-man Carson Wells, Sheriff Bell, and the unfortunate Llewelyn Moss. Moss discovers a drug bust gone wrong and absconds with a briefcase full of millions of dollars. But Chigurh, Wells, and the dealers are also on the trail of that money, and no one will stand in their way to get it back. Meanwhile, Sheriff Bell is trying to protect Moss and his young wife, knowing full well the degree of danger they are in. The trails crisscross through Texas and the body count continually rises. I don't want to give anything else away, so I'll advise you to read it for yourself. McCarthy is a talented writer who deserves your attention.

No Country for Old Men is a modern classic. A classic that gives hints of another time, the time of Faulkner and O'Conner, a time of a men looking for the good in a grotesque world.

No country for old men is a powerfully written novel that evokes man's eternal struggle against an encroaching barbarism that always threatens to swallow our civilization whole. Our struggle against our own depravity and evil inhumanity.

This chilling novel invokes our most inner fears in order to show our innermost struggles as human beings. Great novel,make sure you spend time thinking about its significance.

I want to strike while the iron is hot, a few hours after finishing "No Country For Old Men," while I'm still enjoying the adrenelin rush it provided. This fast-paced, streamlined crime novel seems like a real departure for the author of "All the Pretty Horses" (there's nary a horse to be found in "Old Men's" pages) but it's certainly his most accessible work and possibly his best. Coincidence?

Perhaps not. In the past, McCarthy's brooding style has been likened to Faulkner's. But there's no time to brood in "No Country For Old Men," and McCarthy has largely omitted the descriptive passages that earned such comparisons. Here it seems, the guiding light is Hemingway's sparseness. In McCarthy's hands, the words comes out like a spring river, crisp, clean, cold and fast. The mayhem starts on page 7 and continues for some time. The story moves like a scalded dog. So save it for a weekend day, you'll want to devour it in a single sitting. Once I got past the set-up at the beginning, I only put the novel down once--to call a friend to tell them what a great novel I was reading.

But McCarthy's trump card in this book is his dialogue: a telegraphic Texas stacatto of suprisingly few words but tremendous power--and often, humor. There were several times when I just had to set the book down for a few moments to allow myself a short hoot over something someone was saying. If Samuel Beckett had been Teaxan instead of Irish, he might have written dialogue like this. But as far as I know, no one else ever has.

Granted, the book is not critic-proof. The last 50 pages may come as a letdown to many readers, but I'm willing to give McCarthy the benefit of the doubt that something important is happening in these pages (and much more willingly than I was, say, of the quixotic quest that makes up the last section of "Pretty Horses"). They're not the part of this book that I'll remember. But I will remember it. The sociopath Chigurh's more verbose passages may simply be there to show that he likes to mentally torture some of his victims, and that the mind can rationalize anything (and how exactly). Sherrif Bell's ruminations do provide a framework of sorts, and a great breather from the breakneck speed of the action. These really do come to dominate the last 50 pages, but as I said, I'll give McCarthy the benefit of a doubt that there is a moral complexity beyond mere good and evil in the sherriff's thoughts. Here's hoping a second, less propulsive reading will more readily find that complexity.

Here's also hoping that this book will make a big splash with the casual reader, outside the groves of academia where McCarthy is already revered as a master stylist. This is simply a great crime novel. It rocks. To paraphrase myself, no novel by so highly regarded a writer has had this high a body count (unless it's the author's own "Blood Meridian"). One of the ironies of the novel's title is that if the character isn't an old man once the novel begins, he's not likely to live to become one.

So batten down the hatches, turn off the phones, send the kids away and grab a copy. As cinematic as this book is, they don't need to make a movie. The images are still unreeling in my head.

This is a tough review for me to write. It's not a particularly positive one, and that's the tough part. I am an enormous Cormac McCarthy fan. I own a copy of every book he's written, even his play, The Stonemason. I loved all his early novels. I believe Blood Meridian to be his masterpiece, and I'm glad he received all the accolades he did for the Border Trilogy. All that being true, I'm disappointed with No Country for Old Men. I think, actually, that it's my least favorite of all his novels.

At the beginning I was impressed with the crime-novel feel of it. I would've welcomed a more traditional McCarthy novel, with all of his verbal pyrotechnics and beauty, but I didn't mind that he'd turned that down a bit and was doing something different. I'd heard that the book was fast and furious, and considering that I like well written crime fiction I didn't look down on McCarthy moving this way. The first few violent scenes are written with a graphic, lyric beauty that nobody does better. It's reminiscent of James Carlos Blake and James Lee Burke: two authors who've undoubtedly learned a thing or to from McCarthy. I'd of been content if the novel had continued right through to the end with the same driving plot and action. But it doesn't.

About 3/4 of the way through the crime drama of the novel is over, and we shift almost completely to the Sheriff Bell's meditations on the poor state of American society. (Apparently, blue hair and nose rings are a sign of the decline of our civilization, along with not saying "mam" and "sir".) Maybe I'm thick, but none of his rambling narration made much sense to me. I don't mean that it's hard to follow, I just mean that maybe McCarthy is TOO successful at rendering this man's voice. It's a bit tiresome. I get his point, but it doesn't feel like he has anything to add. It's like he's old enough that he feels he has no ownership, no control or stake in the future, no ideas on how to make it better, no hope that that's even possible. If I was sitting across from this guy in a bar I'd be looking for a way out of the conversation. Unfortunately, for much of the later portions of this novel I was likewise wishing it was over. The narrative tension that drove so much of it is simply left lingering. The main conflict that you might think the novel is heading for never materializes.

I read somewhere that this manuscript was cut down considerably from what McCarthy first handed in. I didn't know what to make of that when I first heard it, but now I think it was probably a good thing. Had this been longer I'd probably have grown more and more against it. As is... Well, if you're a McCarthy fan there's nothing you can do but read it. Maybe you'll like it better - as many here seem to have - or maybe your admiration of the writer will armor you against some of the faults. If you're new to McCarthy I don't recommend beginning here. Try All the Pretty Horses. If you like that head on to some of the earlier novels, like Outer Dark or Child of God or Suttree. And if you're still on board definitely try Blood Meridian. There's no other novel like it in the world. No Country for Old Men, in my opinion, does not shine with the unique voice and vision of those works. That said, I remain in awe of this author. As I'm writing this I'm flipping through the opening pages of All the Pretty Horses.. And now through the beginning of The Crossing... These books are absolute magic. The great books McCarthy has written live on. This just isn't one of them, and it sort feels like an injustice to author to pretend otherwise.

I have very conflicted feelings about this book. The stark settings and the no nonsense dialogue, the trap that money creates for Moss, the meditations of Sheriff Bell on the nature of life in the 21st century and the fact that he no longer has a place in it, are all pure genius. It is easy to enter this dark world where the tension never lets up and feel your pulse start to race as the strain Moss is under increases with each page and where anyone else may be collateral damage; McCarthy creates this world and you can't wait to escape it as each event brings you closer to the inevitable ending. The problem for me is the embodiment of all this evil is just too inhuman. I don't mean in his behavior, people are capable of great evil, rather it is the "Terminator" like approach he takes; despite wounds and circumstances that would cause a human being to lay low or give up, Chigurh continues on. It just cut into the believability a bit and I found myself being distracted by this machine-like killer, occasionally to the detriment of my involvement in the story. But I always found myself being pulled back in and even though I knew where it would all finish, I was there to the bitter end.

For those who have already perused the author's previous novels, say, Blood Meridian, or even his subsequent work, The Road, there is a striking missing element in this middle piece, which surely is not accidental. In more than 300 pages of text, the spectacularly visual and densely imagistic prose for which the author is perhaps without contemporary equal, is almost entirely absent. None of the characters are described physically, and the scenery, whether indoor or outdoor, is depicted mainly by its conventional label... the brand and model of a truck, the calibre gun, so on so forth, because we can ourselves imagine how it looks. Although the movie has done justice to the text, it seems a shame from this perspective, that the blanks which were undoubtedly meant by the author for us as readers to fill in, have been filled in for us. Alas, the message is nonetheless not lost.

NCFOM is a stunning meditation on evil in Cormac McCarthy's resonant, unique prose. The audio version, narrated by Tom Stechschulte, is magnificent - chilling and edgy from beginning to end.

Stechschulte's portrayals of Anton Chigurh, Ed Tom Bell, Llewelyn Moss and the minor characters are charged with energy and power, each wonderfully distinct as individuals in voice and emotion. His work portraying the female characters is as good as you might ask from a male performance. In all, Stechschulte's performance is second only perhaps to George Guidall's incomparable reading of Don Quixote (see my other reviews).

Grab this audio book from your local library for your next commute or car trip. It is an emotional engaging experience, not to be forgotten any time soon.

I have read 4 of Cormac McCarthy's books and this is without a doubt his best piece of work. It is ten times better than the Road and that won the Pulitzer! Although it is excessively violent at times (approximately 80% of the time), McCarthy explores so many different themes in a very subtle way. You could be halfway through the book and think that the main point of the book is one thing, but after you read the last page, you'll know the book is about something different, something more meaningful.
Also, I think most people categorize McCarthy's style as "Southern Goth" so take that for what it is, if you don't like that style, you probably won't completely enjoy this book or might find difficulty getting through it. If you have not read any of McCarthy's books and you want to, this is a good one to start with because it is not as overbearing. Some of his older books like All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian are written in an extremely difficult Southern Goth style which has a very specific taste.
One of my favorite quotes from the book which will also give you a feel for the dialect McCarthy uses:
"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?"
On a final note, if you have seen the movie but have not read the book, the ending of the movie does not do it justice so read the book!

I read this book, bought because I enjoyed five or so of McCarthy's previous books, on last night's flight back from Boston to Seattle.

The action was as crisp as always, relentless and engaging. But maybe it was the crowded airborne quarters, or more likely some of the themes just didn't resonate, and I was not completely satisfied in the end. Specifically, the theme that the 60's and the drug trade are leading society to leave Christian ways and descend into hopeless lawlessness seemed quaint and out of step with reality. A few too many door cylinders were shot out, and guns silenced, as well.

Nevertheless, the weaving of morality and amorality, calculation and miscalculation, and growing to maturity into an action tale was head and shoulders above most books that are bestsellers.

Unlike The Road (the movie version of which, inexplicably, showed up in one theater in Atlanta but nowhere closer to me ((WHY?))), I actually saw the movie version of No Country for Old Men first. The movie was next to brilliant (but, of course, it's a Coen brothers film, so you know...), but having just finished the book I can now apply that wonderfully worn but almost always true cliche' to this story: the book is better than the movie.

Bottom line: McCarthy can write like a tornado. His prose is stark and brutal. It's very deceptive. There are almost no rhetorical frills to it and almost no overly complex sentences but, when you finish reading McCarthy's work you wake up a couple of days later feeling bruised, like you've been sucker punched by your Grandpa. If you just got lost in all that, let me just assure you that, yes, that was a compliment.

Mrs. Richardson wanted to sit this one out, having just read The Road. She loved The Road, as did/do I, but it was a dark read and she wanted a respite. So, of course, a few nights back I say, "Listen to this scene," and, of course, she says the next morning, "He's a really good writer!" And there you go. We read most of it together.

Depending on how much Cormac McCarthy's views are similar to those of Sheriff Bell (and I suspect they're very similar), he may just be my new best friend. Bell's sporadic reflections, italicized throughout, were worth the read. He drops wisdom about family, God, truth, faith, war, patriotism, and, of all things, abortion. This last point very much caught me off guard, pleasantly. Bell recounts sitting next to a liberal woman at a conference who wants to make sure that her daughter grows up in a country where she can get an abortion. Bell wryly assures her that there does not seem to be much threat of that changing. Then he goes on to say (and I paraphrase): "I suspect she'll always be able to get an abortion. She'll also be able to have you put to sleep too." Bell then notes that that ended the conversation.

Brilliant, I say, and true!

Chigurh is more brutal in the book than in the movie, if that's possible. Little scenes the movie left out gave me chills. After shooting up the Mexican dope dealers after his gunfight with Llewelyn, Chigurh stands over one of them ready to execute them. The dope dealer looks away. Chigurh says, "No. I want you to look at me." Then he shoots him. It's at moments like these that you enter and understand the Sheriff's suffocating anxiety about what's happening to the world. Chigurh is amoral, cold, soulless almost.

Llewelyn is a tragic figure. You pull for him, of course. He's a good guy, especially in how faithful he is to his wife (and isn't that a rarity in big-time stories like this?), but he's proud. His pride is his undoing. There are hints throughout that his time in Vietnam is playing into this. But, in the end, Llewelyn just isn't a Chigurh. When he has Chigurh at gunpoint in his hotel room (another scene not in the movie), he won't shoot him. Part of you thinks, "If you shot that guy, your troubles would be mostly over." But that's just it. Llewelyn isn't a Chigurh. He's not a killer.

I'll just finally note that I am still chewing here on McCarthy's point. I think I get it then it seems to elude me. But I'll say this: it resonates with me. I feel that I understand it even if I can't articulate it. The closing dream is key: Bell's father going ahead with fire in a horn. It's an image that McCarthy really likes and he uses it throughout The Road. Oddly enough, it reminds me of the end of Brideshead Revisited, where Charles Ryder stands before the small flame in the Brideshead family chapel, then walks out smiling. (Heck, it reminds me of of Gandalf's secret-flame-guardianship-announcement on the bridge of Khazad-dum!)

I somehow think that the key to understanding McCarthy is in that reappearing flame. It's awful small in his stories, but it is not extinguished. I suspect it makes McCarthy smile in his less morose moments. I'm starting to think I might know what it is.

That is no country for old men. The young
in one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

--the opening stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats

The theme of Yeats' poem is the impermanence of this world, and so he set sail "To the holy city of Byzantium" where things are made of more permanent stuff such "as Grecian goldsmiths make" and where things are eternal like ideas.

But what has this to do with Cormac McCarthy's mesmerizing and seductive narrative?

Well, perhaps not as much as McCarthy thought when he came up with the title or when he began his tale. One thing is clear, the bloody violence of the border towns of West Texas about which he writes resemble more "the mackerel-crowded seas" than the holy city of Byzantium, and the "sensual music" is the sound of bullet hitting bone from those dying generations at their song.

The novel is a triumph, both artistically and commercially for the gifted Mr. McCarthy, one of many. What I think aspiring novelists can learn from this is that the power of voice, story and character easily triumphs over any kind of defect that might exist in technique or composition. McCarthy makes his own artistic rules as spins out his tales like shining dimes shimmering across a waxed counter--or dimes thrown in the air to land on heads or tails to decide if you live or die, which is what happens to a couple of the characters in this tale.

Anton Chigurh is the ironically triumphant character in the novel, with the passably human Llewelyn Moss his counterpoint and foil. Chigurh is a psychopath with a code: you harm, insult or even inconvenience me and you die. (Maybe sometimes just for sport I'll flip a coin and if you call it right I'll let you live.) Moss is a fated character who made one fatal error. He's tough and tenacious but a bit out of his league versus Chigurh who is something like the terminator made flesh. All behave like driven animals with the exception of Sheriff Bell who is reflective and philosophic. He is the old man who learns that this is no longer the country for him.

The plot centers around a dope drop in the semi-desert gone bad that Moss stumbles onto some time after the shooting has stopped. Bodies everywhere. Bullet holes in vehicles, blood, etc. And one guy still alive begging for agua. I aint got no water, Moss tells him. Shrewd and with an eye to gaining something big, he's thinking about other things, like where's the money? He follows the bloody trail of someone carrying something heavy and finds him and it. It's a carrying case full of used hundred dollar bills.

He takes the case and heads home to his wife, has a beer, etc. But in the middle of the night he returns to the scene, and it is here that McCarthy begins to allow the plot to get a little shabby and the logic to go south. Why does he return? He says, "Somethin I forgot to do." Apparently what he forgot to do is give the dying Mexican some water. Funny thing about that. It's 12 hours later at one o'clock in the morning when he remembers this and it's another hour and fifteen before he reaches the Mexican who is now freshly dead with what appears to be a brand new bullet hole in his forehead.

When reading this I thought Moss had returned possibly to get the heroin or maybe to shoot the Mexican who might be able to identify him. But no, Moss's fatal flaw is his kindness.

His kindness! I guess he didn't realize that bringing the man who had been bleeding for a day or two some water wasn't really going to help. If he wanted to help he could have dialed 911.

There are some other minor plot problems and loose ends, but they really don't matter. What matters is McCarthy's brilliant prose, the flawless dialogue, the masterful sketches of the land, and especially his lean narrative that makes the action and the characters vivid and indelible.

Although I have termed this an artistic and commercial triumph I would not call it an unqualified success. The loose ends, the mixed narratives in which Bell appears both in the first person and in the omniscient third, the slight development of most of the characters--although what is developed is very good--and the admixture of an existential ending with Bell's attempts to find a greater meaning are disconcerting. But I don't think McCarthy was much worried about any of this. His intense involvement with the struggles and experiences of his characters is what probably gave him the most artistic satisfaction. Straightening up the details would not be as important.

By the way, the Coen brothers of Fargo (1996) movie fame, violence meisters themselves, whose first film, Blood Simple (1984), was set in Texas, have made a film adapted from McCarthy's novel set for release August 7, 2007. It will star Josh Brolin as Moss, Woody Harrelson as Wells, Tommy Lee Jones as Bell, and Javier Bardem as Chigurh. It should be a doosie. The screenplay must have been easy to write since McCarthy's novel is so very visual and so full of clever stuff.

I have to say I don't like the fact that one of our most successful and brilliant novelists is a master of violence. Is it an accident that the public has rewarded him, or is it the case that he is a product of his times and rides the Zeitgeist? We are living in an age of escalating violence and perhaps that is reflected in our literature.

I picked this book up in anticipation of seeing the film version. Until then I wasn't aware the book existed and was not familiar at all with the author. This was the first, and is to date the only, book of his that I have read.

I was captivated by his use of the dialogue. Being from the south and being able to adapt to the southern way of speaking might have made it easier for me to keep up with the book than others. It's hard to follow at times, because he doesn't use quotation marks to denote when a character is speaking audibly. It also can make it hard to distinguish who is speaking.

In keeping with that thought, it should be noted that this isn't a book that you will just breeze through. While it's not overly long I wouldn't describe it as a light read.

If you've already seen this film I would wait some time before you pick up the book. (give it somet time to get out of your teeth) That way you can fully enjoy the book for what it is, and not just use it as a companion to the film.

While I can't vouch for any of his other works, yet at least, I am definitely a fan of "No Country for Old Men".

You look at what's there, and wonder how it can add up to what it does. A potboiler of a plot, told largely in dialog between people who leave most of what they mean unsaid. Action and violence played out in the sparsest prose imaginable. Key events left undescribed altogether. Yet the result is almost supernaturally powerful. There is a scene late in the book, again consisting almost entirely of dialog, that so unrelentingly moves towards its foregone conclusion that I found myself involuntarily looking away from the page as one might avoid seeing the results of a traffic accident. This is, indeed, brutal stuff: many have decided that McCarthy is represented here by his cranky philosopher of a sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, but I think he may be more aligned with the chilling villain Chigurh, implacably following his own grim logic in the face of all norms and expectations.

After reading The Border Trilogy, I found this novel compromising in style, prose and depth. It reads more like a screenplay than the intensive prose effort of one of America's greatest contemporary novelist. The story lines is, nevertheless, engaging and timely considering all the violence that is currently taking place along the Mexican American border. Usually, movie goers will say that the book is better than the film adaptation but I find the reverse true in this case. McCarthy has seemingly relinquished his painstaking, descriptive style for a lean, mean Hemingwayesque mode of writing that disappoints anyone who has read his previous works, especially The Border Trilogy. Sadly, this is what Hollywood does to American authors. It transforms them from literary, timeless giants to flash in the pan scriptwriters. Hopefully, Mr. McCarthy will return in the future with a novel worthy of his timeless talent and elegant, descriptive sensibilities. Also, the binding and cut off the hardback edition is substandard and obviously done on the cheap by the publishers. All indications point towards the objective of making a popular motion picture and nothing less.

There are three sentences in the italicized first page of McCarthy's earlier work,'OUTER DARK'. There are twenty four sentences accordioned onto the first italicized page of 'NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.' Unlike some of his earlier writing there is nary a single word in his current novel that will send the reader scurrying to find a dictionary. This style; short sentence structure and spare wording set the reader flying through the story of a drug deal gone violently bad and subsequent flight of local 'good ole boy' Llewelyn Moss pursued by the amoral, murderous Chigurh. This is a fast moving,'can't put it down' novel.

There is also the first-person singular voice of Sheriff Bell interspersed throughout that reflects on the evils of the day and life in general. This lends a certain moral counterpoint to the unrelenting violence of the chase story and helps keep the novel on a level separate from so many popular murder mysteries.

If you are a Cormac McCarthy fan this may be a disappointing read. The language here is lean, unlike the rich, engrossing wording in many of his previous novels. It is a treat to re-read some of McCarthy(Blood Meridian,Suttree,etc.). It's doubtful there is much in NCFOM that will compel a re-visit. However, it is one heck of a thrill ride, almost a 'summer read'. But if you are not familiar with McCarthy do not expect everybody to come out of the far end of a dark tunnel into the light of day. More likely, just the opposite.

Yes, this is a violent book. It is also a thrill to read. One of those books that will surely and unfortunately be made into an awful movie. But read the book now before Hollywood ruins it.You'll like it.

This is one of those rare books that actually translated into a better film. The movie version deservedly won Best Picture for 2007, and it certainly benefited from its source material. However, McCarthy's writing is curious, to put it mildly. His prose is alternately insightful and infuriating; he is not content to write in a traditional style, which sometimes works to the book's advantage and sometimes works to its disadvantage. His subject matter is dark and ambitious, and in some ways, his writing fits it, but not always.

No Country For Old Men is written mostly in staccato form, which captures the fragmented nature of man's behavior but is also downright maddening at times. There are sections where this seems appropriate, but in a number of instances, it's vexing and downright frustrating to read. There is also a lot of southern vocabulary, which does indeed add to the genuineness of the setting and makes the story more vivid, even if you have to have a dictionary alongside you. The names were also very southern-sounding but also a bit pretentious, not to mention difficult to pronounce, at least at first (Chigurh? Llewelyn?). The most affecting parts of the novel are the interposing thoughts of the Texan sheriff at the center of events, which are both elegant and heartbreaking.

The names are the only thing about this book that even suggest pretentiousness. The story is simple yet tense and full of meaning. Llewelyn Moss comes across a drug deal gone bad, complete with rotting bodies and a suitcase full of money. He takes this suitcase, but he makes the mistake of returning to the crime scene to try to save the one man who was still alive. For some reason or another that is never really explained (but is implied), Chigurh is there and spots him, thus setting in motion the events that make up the rest of the novel. This scene is a perfect way to start the book off. Llewelyn likely would have gotten away with his misdeed had he not stumbled over his own conscience, and he is aware of this beforehand, yet he marches on to almost certain devastation. Right from the outset we are presented with complex characters and layered interactions, and they never disappear.

This is much, much more than just a chase novel, even though the chase takes up much of the narrative. The themes of predestination, chance, and adaptation are presented subtly and skillfully. Does our basic sense of humanity and goodness prevent us from living a live free of conflict and harm? Is the world so infested with evil that we cannot hope to lead a life free from its infection? These are just some of the questions McCarthy asks us, and he doesn't give us any facile answers. Despite a somewhat problematic approach, No Country for Old Men lives up to its reputation as one of the better novels in recent years.

If you've seen the film 'No Country for Old Men' then the book from which it was adapted will have little in the way of surprises, or actually the only surprise would be at how faithful the film adaptation was to the original story. But for those who haven't seen it, 'No Country for Old Men' is about a drug smuggling episode that went bad and its terrible aftermath of killings by a crazed monster looking for the man who stole the loot. It all takes in west Texas circa 1980. There is a sheriff who tries in vain to catch up to the bad guys and, well, shakes his head at how ugly the world has become.

I will say that there is one aspect of the book that is bit more pronounced than the movie. The author goes into the head of our frustrated and disgusted sheriff to a much greater extent, which actually doesn't add to the overall story or reading enjoyment. What basically reads as a terrific yet horrific action story is mixed with almost philosophical thoughts by the sheriff character. I'm not sure what the author was trying to achieve but I suspect he didn't succeed. All it did was tarnish an otherwise excellent read.

Bottom line: see the movie instead.

From reading synopsies of this book you would think it was about drugs, drug money and manhunts. But though the books raps around a busted drug deal and $2.4 million that's gone missing, it's really about America and what is happening to this country as a result of drugs and the Drug Cartels. All the violence in the book (of which there is more than enough to keep Sam Pekinpah happy) goes down to the lust for money and the people who are involved in this trade having little or no regard for other peoples lives.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (a WW2 ETO veteran) has been the law in his county for most of the last thirty odd years (and before that his daddy was). He has seen how the drug trade has encroached on the west Texas desert towns and its effect on everyone and everything. People begin to mind their own business and/or fear for their lives when they hear cars and planes moving in the desert at night. The money that the trade brings can by anything and anyone.

When three cars are found outside of his hometown with eight or nine dead bodies, they cars all shot up with illegal machine pistols, and both the drugs and money missing; everyone knows that someone will come looking for both, and it won't be pretty if they don't find it.

The money is found by Llwellyn Moss (a 'Nam vet and ex-sniper) who was out hunting for antelope when he found the cars and bodies. He's 36, a part- time mechanic, with a nineteen year old wife; and he knows that some one will want that money back, and they are not going to ask nicely.

McCarthy does a great job with Wells and Moss, but the other main character and boy is he one is named Chigurh (rhymes with sugar) and he is just to much of a psychopath to be believable. He's what we called in 'Nam, a 'phantom' or 'ghost'. These were special forces guys who would go out into 'Indian Country-the boonies' and execute North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officers. Many of them lived in the 'highlands' with the 'Yards

(the Hmong) and hardly ever came back 'inside'. They were reputed to have been used in Laos, Cambodia, the North and even infiltrated into China to wreck havoc with the transportation systems bringing weapons into North Vietnam. These guys were scary, we used to say they had yellow eyes that glowed in the dark. Nobody, messed with these guys.

He therefore is not a believable character. They are just not sociable enough even to be a hitman because they are too unstable. The FBI/CIA/ATF has been reported to have taken more than one of them out because they represented a clear and present danger to the country. But because he represents evil incarnate, it makes the book seem more like a fantasy then a modern story of good and evil.

Interesting but not quite up to the Trilogy.

Having been a fan of some of Cormac McCarthy's work, as well as a fan of the visually arresting trailer for the Coen Brother's movie adaptation, I felt the need to experience the book before the movie was released. I found myself not actually all that able to get through the book that quickly, and that's, above all else what leads me to be so on the fence in thinking about it - ultimately, it's less page-turning than it should be. At the same time, there are parts of it that are magnificent. Following the cat and mouse game of assassin Chigurh and Moss, the war vet Texan in over his head, No Country is exciting sometimes, but it's also overly ripe for movie adaptation - a litany of scenes meant for easy adaptability into an action movie. Now, this would hardly matter if the story itself was exciting, but the truth is McCarthy's stoic prose style is a little out of place for such square storytelling - his predilection for anonymous, indistinctly punctuated conversations and minimalist, pronoun-happy descriptions of events often get confusing, as if waiting to get punched up by a creative director. At the same time the plot-heavy momentum seems to be lagging, McCarthy begins each chapter with an italicized rant from its main character, Sheriff Bell, on the changing moral structure of the country, rants that ring with conscience and put the action of the story in context. Except, somewhere around two thirds through the story, it switches - the action becomes wily and inventive, and suddenly Bell's I-wasn't-made-for-these-times speeches become repetitive, having seemingly the same sepiated thought expressed 900 different ways. That switch is indicative of McCarthy's strengths and weaknesses in this mixed bag - for every character that fascinates (Sheriff Bell), there's one that frustrates (the scenes with Carson Wells, another drug runner in the book, seem so generic they might as well be copy and pasted out of a John Grisham book). It all leads me stuck in the middle in a way I haven't been with any of McCarthy's other books - wanting to recommend it as much as I want to roll my eyes at it.

I read this novel straight through which is very unusual for me.It was my first experience of McCarthy's writing and I think it is first rate,but not for the squeamish-people like Anton Chigurh are around in greater numbers than one can imagine-spawned by wars and prisons or plain old psychopathic personality-the author has created a villain who is unfortunately realistic-not safely depicted as a creature who could exist only in the imagination.The basis of the book concerns drug trafficking,always a good starting point for generating amoral behavior.The counterpoint to Chigurh is Sherrif Bell,an old school cop with just the kind of self doubt and imperfections that make him trustworthy.Don't look for a formulaic story here-McCarthy tells an oft told tale in a new and effective way-if you're looking for a story of justice triumphant you won't find it here,but you will find one hard hitting story nonetheless.

McCarthy's appeal is lost on me. I have read a lot of fiction and poetry and have written one review (of a poetry collection) for a literature journal. The start of "No Country for Old Men" is excellent. It reminded me of James Crumley's early work and "The Last Good Kiss" and the "Wrong Case" should be read by everyone who likes what I refer to as junk (pulp/noir) literature. And junk literature is my favorite genre. I had high hopes for "No Country" and McCarthy does write well. Moss is an appealing character but ultimately his actions are unbelievable. He is a Vietnam (three tours) sniper who doesn't drop the hammer on a killer? Ultimately the nihilism and the holes in the plot overwhelm what could have been a great novel. Also, the character of the invincible, soulless killer is trite and threadbare. Evil men exist but here we have a dreary demon. Also, some of the weapons mentioned which are common now would not have been available in the mid "80's" -- which I think is the time period in which the novel is set. In fact, the novel actually seems to occur in some alternate universe. Ultimately, I think it succeeds only as an allegory of evil, unresolved and boring. The hero does not have to triumph or even survive but we need to have learned something about a life, or living, if a novel is to be successful.

I wanted to read this after seeing the movie a dozen times. I wasn't disappointed. I am glad that I saw the movie first. I loved the movie and the actors. When I read the book the image of Tommy Lee Jones appeared with the narration of the sheriff. There is more detail in the book, as expected, but the movie follows the book very closely. A very well-written book. I must admit that I've never read anything by Cormac McCarthy but I sure am glad that I read this. I got this book via my library onto my Kindle. Normally I like to read the book first and in almost every case the book is better. This is not the case. I liked the movie better because of the excellent work by the Coen brothers and the actors. Jardim (Chigurch - spelling may not be correct for either of these) was amazing and his face appeared in my mind when I read the book. Is it worth reading since it follows so closely to the book? I would say, yes, You owe it to the author and you owe it to yourself!

I'd never read anything by McCarthy before, but am a huge Coen Brothers fan -- so when I learned that their next project was an adaptation of this book, I made a mental note to check it out. Of course, about a year came and went before I actually read it, and by then the movie was in theaters. So the day after finishing the book, I went out and saw the movie, with the result that my impression of the book and the film are completely intermingled in ways I would have a very hard time untangling. That said, the film version is one of the most faithful adaptations I've come across and a very large portion of its brilliance can be directly credited to McCarthy's novel.

Set in the early 1980s in Texas, the story revolves around three men. First is Llewelyn Moss, a rugged, capable Vietnam vet in his late '30s or so, who lives an honest life, likes a good time, has a sense of humor, and is the kind of handy everyman that makes for a good protagonist. The story opens with him out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande. in the course of which he discovers the aftermath of a heroin deal gone bad: several shot up pickups and a lot of dead Mexicans. He also tracks down a case containing several million dollars, and doesn't hesitate to grab it.

The second main character is Sheriff Bell, a rugged, reflective, weary old-timer in whose county the killings occurred. He speaks to the reader directly in monologues throughout the book, tying the country's history of violence to the violence of the story's events as he tries to figure out just what is going on. These can be rather cheesy and hokey at times, but that's part of the point -- their style established the Sheriff's as a man of the past. The future is embodied by the final man in the trinity, Anton Chigurh. Forget your serial killer or gangster stories, this very odd hit man is among the purest incarnation of evil to be found in modern fiction. He has been hired to track down the missing money, and by his logic anyone who causes him any delay simply needs to be deleted.

Moss's is a classic moral dilemma: what would you do if you found a lot of money. Would it matter where the money came from? Would the amount matter? Etc. In theory, Moss could have gotten clean away with the money, however his own code of ethics betrays him. His return to the scene of the carnage to fulfill a dying man's meaningless request both exhibits his humanity and makes him the prey of this story. Soon he is playing a deadly hide and seek with both Mexican drug dealers and Chigurh, with Sheriff Bell perpetually a step or three behind the action, cleaning up the bodies. Moss's sense of honor isn't his only problem though -- he also suffers from the sin of pride -- in believing he can handle Chigurh, he is responsible for a portion of this tragedy.

For some readers, Moss's decisions may be so improbable and at odds with the stakes involved that they will be frustrated. However, it's important to realize that this isn't a straightforward crime story. McCarthy's clearly using the genre to speak to larger themes, with each of the three main characters as almost mythic figures in a moral landscape of good and evil. Meanwhile, he also subverts the genre in several ways that oughtn't be revealed here but may also greatly frustrate some readers. Nonetheless, told with simple, almost staccato language, this a gripping, somber, and very violent story -- one that makes for both and outstanding read and an outstanding film.

WARNING: DO NOT START READING THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU CAN FINISH IT IN ONE SITTING. IT IS THAT GOOD. McCarthy has written a spare, gripping, and violent novel. It might be too disturbing for some readers since it is gory. Decent people die on a whim and an evil psychopath is unstoppable. Time and place are indistinct and the characters are unglamorous. Despite all this, you will not be able to put this book down. It is written so expertly, so directly, that there is no fat, all red meat-and it is definitely not for the faint hearted. Some reviewers have misunderstood the point of this book, it appears. McCarthy is not "meandering." He is speaking plainly to the reader, through a sherriff, about modern society. The cruelty, unfairness and insanity, particularly in his criminal protagonist, cannot be disputed. He is like a reincarnated Billy The Kid, unpredictable, resourceful and deadly. The book is a sharply drawn, stark, slice of life, that, deceptively, seems to start and end without all the answers...just like life.

This is a special book on numerous levels. It is a Western that is set in modern times with a great deal of morality infused into it. The plot, itself, is not a complex one, yet it becomes a classic in the hand of the writer. Each chapter begins with musings by the Sheriff about the world, his life and how things have evolved with the passage of time. This gives the reader great insight into the character as well as the motivations for his actions. The characters are all richly developed in this superb work that almost reads like a moralty play. It is a deeply satisfying book by a superb writer. It does not fit into the category of being a page-turner, yet is a very special read that is far superior to the film that was based upon this work.

A great novel, it very closely tracks the movie version but with expanded insights. It is a pretty grim story, and it really highlights how narcotics have destroyed the culture of the country, corrupting the US from the top down.

The movie is perfectly cast, and these characters brought to life (especially the wives--Moss's feisty little lady and Bell's blue-eyed Mother Earth) provide a great visual as you read the annotated version in print. The expanded ramblings of Sheriff Bell were the best part of the book. That which is 'numbing' and 'simplistic' for one reader (see Jeffrey Lent's Washington Post review at the top) is pleasing and clear to this reader:

"...you fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin to be done about it it aint even a problem. It's just a aggravation."

And this on Vietnam:

"We didnt have nothin to give to em to take over there. If we'd sent em without rifles I dont know as they'd of been all that much worse off. You cant go to war like that. You cant go to war without God. I dont know what is goin to happen when the next one comes."

Well, go Sheriff Bell. He comes from a simpler time and looks with us at a complex landscape that's scarcely recognizable. Bell vs. Chigurh; sure it's pared down but it's downright thought-provoking.

I liked the movie, "No Country for Old Men," so much that I bought the book, which serves as my introduction to the blood-soaked world of Cormac McCarthy.

"No Country" is a very accessible piece of writing. McCarthy uses modernist techniques, among them the lack of quotation marks when he writes dialogue, but they don't make for difficult reading or obscure his meaning. The novel is written at about an eighth grade level. That's not a criticism; rather, it suggests how straight-forward and economical the story-telling is. One could say the novel uses a Hemingway-like style to examine Faulknerian characters. Inspiration from other writings, however, are at work. One of the book's major themes, that valuable prizes can corrupt those that seek them, is in everything from the Bible (Matthew 16: 26) to Steinbeck's "The Pearl."

The novel's plot centers around the Vietnam veteran Moss, who, while hunting antelope, stumbles across dead bodies, a truck full of heroin, and more than two million dollars cash. Moss takes the money, but unfortunately for him, its owner really, really wants it back. McCarthy never makes it clear, but perhaps some of Pablo Escobar's goons are on Moss's trail.

Also following him is Anton Chiguhr, a kind of independent contractor killer, who is hired by a shady business man to find the money. The main reason I bought the book was to see McCarthy flesh out more the Chiguhr character and his opposite number, the bounty hunter Wells. But he doesn't. Perhaps McCarthy wanted Chiguhr to remain mysterious. More than a flesh and blood character, I think, Chiguhr is a symbol for death, the grim reaper made flesh. And as with death, he is remorseless, unstoppable, prolific, and omnipresent. We can't really dislike Chiguhr, only fear him. He is a force of nature, the novel's most fascinating character, who toys with his victims by giving them a choice: a flip of the coin will decide your fate. Choose wrongly and you die, choose correctly and you live.

The hard-boiled nature of the novel is similar to the traditional crime novel, but what separates it from pulp writing is another theme: is human society, in the era of drive-by-shootings and drug wars, getting worse? The overwhelmed Sheriff Bell thinks it is--even though Bell, who is two steps behind Moss and his pursuers, fought in the most destructive war in history, WWII. Bell sees portents of doom everywhere. He laments the lack of common manners (saying "sir" and "Ma'am") and the sight of youths walking down the street with colored hair and nose piercings. The murder he is investigating, as he sees it, is a new kind of violence, a new trend in human behavior. His is not a country for old men. Given the violence that saturates this book, it really isn't a country for any man. Yet, toward the end of the book, Bell's uncle says life has always been hard, situations violent, people made to suffer. For him, a crippled old man who has survived many hardships, murder, greed, and misery are nothing new.

The movie is very faithful to the book. It is even an improvement on it, since the action and suspense plays better on the screen, I think, than the written page. "No Country for Old Men"is not ambitious enough to be a great book, but it whets your appetite. I will be reading another McCarthy novel very soon.

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men is breathtaking in the book as well as on the big screen (no one could have played Anton Chigurrh more effectively than Javier Bardem, IMHO). The book's language is spare and direct to the point, almost starkly brutal in the things it describes as well as in the things it intentionally leaves unspoken--almost Hemingway-ish in its simplicity and narrative grandeur. It is about unstoppable evil and how, even with the best intentions, you can really be the unluckiest and luckiest person in the world at the same time. And how, sometimes, evil cannot be stopped.

Reviewed by Nick Capo, Assistant Professor of English, Illinois College

The recent movie version of No Country for Old Men undoubtedly will draw additional readers to the book. In his eleventh novel, Cormac McCarthy continues to explore American mythology, the human capacity for violence or evil, and the varieties of manhood. Told primarily from the perspectives of three characters, No Country for Old Men is a riveting, although disturbing, story.

The story's precipitating event is a large heroin deal that ends in a shootout. Criminal organizations on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border then send hirelings to retrieve the drugs and money. Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic assassin, heads toward the Texas desert to retrieve the money. Llewelyn Moss, a hunter and Vietnam veteran, happens upon the dead or dying drug dealers and decides to take a briefcase filled with $2.4 million. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, another veteran, tries to sort out the chaos that is leaving dead bodies scattered across the region.

In this novel, Cormac McCarthy merges the conventions of a thriller with the bleak realism and artistic experimentation of contemporary literary fiction. (Some readers might dislike the minimalist punctuation, the use of regional dialect, and the graphic descriptions.) The book's male characters struggle to achieve their ends in a conflict that is unkind to women who stray into it.

Set roughly a decade after Vietnam, No Country for Old Men examines the effects of violence on men and on the society to which they return. Unfolding when the trafficking of "hard" drugs (cocaine, heroin) was booming, it connects Vietnam and societal vices (drug use, greed) as symptoms of a deeper malaise.

As Sheriff Ed Tom Bell explains to a young reporter, "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight . . . You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people sitting around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it's just too late."

In Sheriff Bell's world, one unlucky encounter, one bad decision, will cost you either your humanity or your life.

Armchair Interviews says: Powerful story, well told.

There's a plot here, to be sure, but this book is worth reading just to enjoy the West Texas old man way of expressing himself. The inserted sections of introspection by the old Sheriff are superb. I suggest that any reader pay special attention to this from the beginning. Other reviewers have pulled out some of the wise sayings of Sheriff Bell, Here's a couple of others: "I think by the time you're grown you're about as happy as you're going to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it." (p.265) Or, 'I think sometimes people would rather have a bad answer about things than no answer at all." (p. 282) (That last quotation might explain to some who wonder why mainstream protestant groups are losing numbers, while more conservative groups are gaining!)

Maybe the ending leaves some unsatisfied, but the book ends the way life does so often. No neat knots tied. But this is an enjoyable book, especially because of one "old man's" musings.

Cormac has done it again. He takes something we value, turns it around reveals to us the emptyness of it, and in the end shows us what we should really value.
Cormac's writing style is simple, yet unbelievably detailed, I don't quite know how he does it. I guess he puts the details where they count, he uses them sparingly, which gives them punch.
No Country, don't kid yourself, more often than not is bleak, cruel & violent to a "T," yet includes moments of hope and love.
Our story details the events of the resourcful "everyman" who stumbles upon a big bag of money (who hasn't had that dream), and finds that those whom it belongs to and one other party are willing to take it back by any means necessary, and it is our hero who must ultimately decide how much he is willing to give up inorder to have a bag of money. Because if you can't enjoy it, its just that a bag of money, and if it brings you pain its hollow.

Typical Cormac in that he uses few words to say a lot. Anton is a dark character to be sure, but I believe the power of the story lies more in the discussion of ethics seen through Bell’s experience in the war, and Anton‘s view on fate versus human choice.

If you liked any of the books in the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy you will like this book. You will be used to lack of punctuation marks and to his use of jumping viewpoints and short terse sentences. If not then take your time with the book and get used to McCarthy's style. I think you'll find it a very good book.
I especially liked Sheriff Bell's character. Sure, he sounds laconic. You may not be used to his West Texas way of talking, but he sounds wise to me. He may not have all the answers, but he asks some damn good questions.
I also like the terms McCarthy uses to describe the land. For example, caliche and datilla. I found myself looking these words up and learning how to describe different terrain types better.

How many times have you seen a movie and heard that the book was better or been disappointed after you read a good book and saw the story brought to the screen?. In the case of Cormac McCarthy's novel-turned-Academy Award winning film, No Country for Old Men, a stark melange of greed, mayhem and twisted morality that plays out in the harsh environs of the Texas-Mexico border, disappointment is just not going to happen.

I saw the movie first and was as blown away as the collection of ill fated characters that meet a remorseless fate in the film. I am first a reader and second a movie goer so I had to have the book. I must say McCarthy is one serious hombre of the page and pen. No Country for Old Men is as sparse as the southwest desert yet his prose packs the wallop of a sawed-off twelve gauge shot gun. His descriptions are lean and mean, seen through the eyes of characters at war with each other and the lives they chose.

McCarthy brings three main characters into stark relief. The first, a psychotic yet disturbingly moral killer, the second a white trash Viet Nam vet who happens on a drug deal gone bad, and finally an aging lawman trying to salvage some good out of the wreckage he sees along life's highway.

From first to last No Country For Old Men is a great read in which you will hear life's dark secrets whispered on a wind that smells of mesquite and gunpowder.

sparse, lovely writing. enthralling characters, well-shaped as much by what isn't said as by what is. Very grim, but there's an underlying beauty for all that, like light reflecting harsh off hard and hard-angled surfaces. Sheriff Bell in particular is engagingly philosophical - aged, confronted by difficult truths he can't see any choice but to face up to, he's reminiscent of a world that never really existed.

Well-written, and well worth the time to slide inside McCarthy's trademark writing style.

No Country for Old Men is the third book I've read by McCarthy and the shortest of the three (The Road & Blood Meridian). It's a quick book, good as one of his are from my experience. There are some differences from the movie, nothing huge in a way you should feel obligated to read it for that reason alone. That said, read the book. It's quick and it's a Cormac McCarthy novel, I mean that's really all you should need.

No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy's new novel, is a stark departure from his lyrically dense and wistful Trilogy series. This is essentially a crime novel set in the west, not a western as most people understand that term. As I read the book I was struck that is is conceived and written more as a Tony Hillerman novel on meth than anything McCarthy has written to date.

Which isn't to denigrate the book. It's very, very good, though extremely violent and nihilistic. The story revolves around a fellow named Llewelyn Moss who comes across the debris of a drug deal gone bad. Amongst the blood and gore is a bag with $2 million in it which Lewellen takes along with him. A fellow named Chigurg (pronounced sugar), an alleged bounty hunter but a hit man with pretensions of respectability is dispatched to reacquire the funds and brutalize the bags temporary holder.

The action is swift, suspenseful and violent.

This is a lean, small novel of spare prose of immense intensity that reflects a bleak and nihilistic vision of mankind. The action occasionally seems a bit contrived (as if, say, someone like Quentin Tarantino were looking over the authors shoulder molding the action to fit the film version) but overall this is an excellent little read that hits fast, hits hard and is gone in what seems like little more than 60 seconds.

I truly enjoyed it but those looking for more of the same from McCarthy may be both shocked and disappointed with this effort.

No Country for Old Men was fascinating storytelling, but not easy to read. It was riveting, stark, violent, and very suspenseful. The author created unusual characters - Bell, Moss, and Chigurh. Bell and Moss both were offered with different levels of character flaws, and both were likable in their own ways. Chigurh was a machine with only slight glimpses of humanity, very well drawn. The drawback of the book is that Cormac McCarthy didn't use quotation marks around the dialog, a literary device that drives me crazy when trying to read. After finishing it, I watched the movie. While I could answer questions that my companion had about the story that wasn't explained well, I liked the screen version better. Perhaps though, reading the book first is the way to better enjoy the movie. This book is recommended, especially to fans of Cormac McCarthy.

I can't say I didn't enjoy this book, but I wasn't exactly sold on it, either (and especially not the cinematic version). It did make me think about the way things are and I do know where Sheriff Bell is coming from.

I didn't really care for the lack of apostrophes and quotes. I don't exactly understand the point of that, except to somehow convey the 1980 South Texas dialect and the sense of decay (for lack of a better word) one feels while reading. And I don't mind not knowing the complete background of each character in a given book, but in this case, you only really get to know the Sheriff. There were just too many unanswered questions for me. The author, I felt, put too much burden on the reader to come up with conclusions. Apparently, a lot of people don't seem to mind that. So be it!

Here's my original review:

"Now, I usually love Cormac's writings (I read Blood Meridian five or six times) but I just couldn't get into No Country For Old Men. It just bored the life out of me. I finally gave up partway through. To the readers who love this book, sorry."

I went back and finished the book. If I could, I would upgrade it to 3 stars out of 5. Although I did in the end enjoy it, I was disappointed. The ending didn't make any sense to me. It reminds me of Cities of the Plain where McCarthy tacked on a bit of bs at the end so that, as one reviewer noted, unfortunate college students could be forced to write essays trying to interpret what McCarthy "means".

In No Country For Old Men, why do all the characters seem talk like Judge Holden from Blood Meridian? Here's an example from page 253, where Chigurh is spouting some Holden-like philosophical gibberish:

"Not everyone is suited to this line of work. The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always on's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it." That could be Judge Holden talking, no?

Or here's something from page 227:

"You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days its made out of. Nothin else." That could be Judge Holden lecturing the Kid around the campfire in Blood Meridian.

In summary, it's an ok read, but I think I'll go back and re-read Blood Meridan now....

No Country for Old Men is a sad tale about the human condition. We are beings who are haunted by our past, afraid of our present and have no confidence in our future. This book like all of Cormac McCarthy's work leaves you wondering how humans have become so cruel and empty. Those capable of love are destroyed by the evil that runs rampant.
McCarthy's writing style is direct and unashamed of its brutal honesty. He makes no effort to make good from evil. He tells the story as succinctly as possible. His words are never wasted. Every word is important and is chosen for a reason. It is a rare gift.

the story was the draw, as someone who loves the Coen Bros movie has to admit, but I really enjoyed his writing style , and will plan on reading some more of his stories about West Texas ( one of the places I still need to experience in the flesh) ... on a different note, the Coen Bros. where pretty damn true to the book, and having seen the movie first actually improved my opinion of both, which is rare.

I bought this book right after the movie came out in theaters. I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie. Both the book and the movie were great. In my opinion the book is slightly better than the movie. There are scenes in the book that you won't see in the movie. Plus, your imagination is always more exiting than anything they will ever put on a screen. This book was extremely easy to read and extremely hard to put down. I love "true crime" type stories and this book read just like one of the best. The story follows a simply man who stumbles into a crime scene that has not been found by anyone other than himself. What he finds here puts him in the direct path of a killing machine of a hit man. Their paths cross and inevitably their lives are changed for the worse. The book is full of suspense and very easy to finish in one or two sittings. Great story, great book.

Riveting story and amazing writing. If you are looking for a happily ever after, this is NOT the book for you. The "man on the run" storyline hooks you and keeps you going. But what makes this book truly amazing is how McCarthy subtly shows how in 30 years (from the 1950's to the 1980's) how the world has drastically changed. Going from an age of Ozzie & Harriet and Leave it to Beaver where people thought saying "damn" was a swear word and no one felt the need to lock their doors. To a world where drugs, murder, sex, and violence are the norm.

McCarthy immediately pulls you into the story and into the character's lives. The ending (which is a somewhat different than the movie AND better than the movie) was fantastic. It doesn't end with everything neatly taken care of, in fact you wonder what is going to happen with a few of the characters. But at the end you can't help but say "WOW!!"

I have no intention of seeing the movie.

I recently finished Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and it led me to this book. Astoundingly well written. I read it twice in two days. Tight, compact, almost terse fiction, but so beautifully written and the characters are well done.

A couple of Cormac McCarthy idiomatic tics: "in the floor", "glassed the valley," "dogcollar."

Good fiction.

So the book's title is "No Country for Old Men", but McCarthy doesn't decide to hammer that concept in until the last 60 pages or so. Before that is one of the most violent and exciting noir stories that I have ever read. It's as if he said hmm I've written this beach novel, and now I've got to make it literary. I like his literary, but he does damned good beach novel as well. I'll tell you this. I've never read anything quite like this book. The way the exciting part ends and the lecture about how the country has gone to ka-ka takes over is weird. I sure will be interested to see how the Coen's handle filming the subject. My guess is they'll embellish the noir and downplay Sheriff Bell's philosophizing, and it'll be one of those rare cases of the movie being better than the book.

knees what you would probably would come up with is narcotics."

Thirty-six year old welder Llewelyn Moss stumbles upon a grisly crime scene, obviously drug-related, in south Texas while out hunting one day. The lone survivor, barely breathing, asks him for water. Without obliging, Moss follows a blood trail to yet another casualty who happens to be in possession of a briefcase filled with millions in cash. He takes the money and runs, hides the dough, and returns to the scene, presumably to take care of the near-dead man. Moss realizes he's in a heap of trouble when he discovers that the last man standing (actually, sitting) has since been murdered. Several players want his money and his life, including the ruthless, vindictive Anton Chigurh and a seemingly reasonable hired hit man, Carson Wells. Sheriff Bell, within whose jurisdiction the drug deal went bad, rounds out the cast of major characters as the primary law enforcement officer on the case. Lots of blood, many lives, and this reader's interest are lost before it ends. Although McCarthy's unusual writing style is always a welcome diversion from the usual, the story continues beyond what is necessary, the angle involving Sheriff Bell is not very interesting and the point, if there was one, never became clear. No Country for Old Men was by far my least favorite of the three novels of his I've read. Much better: The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Homicide by David Simon.

While hunting near the Rio Grande Llewlyn Moss stumbles upon a heroin transaction gone wrong: trucks shot up and several dead bodies, some of them Mexican. Inside one of the trucks Moss finds a leather document case level full of hundred dollar banknotes in packets fastened with bank tape stamped each with the denomination $ 10,000. When Moss decides to leave the scene of the crime with the money little does he suspect that this is the beginning of a wild and bloody manhunt between him and Anton Chigurh who is determined to get hold of the money.

Although a standard western good-guy bad-guy plot at first sight, this novel is serious literature with an absorbing and chilling plot which can be seen as a study of a burning American rage and how common that rage has become. Chigurh is a truly sinister character and the novel meditates on the fight between good and evil in men and society. McCarthy's language is stunningly economical. Characters are often defined by a single line of conversation and places made vivid within the confine of a sentence. And he is very good at capturing the tenor of the south Texan dialogue.

I loved this movie so much, I had to see what the book was like. Not disappointed! This is a short, easy read. If you have not seen the movie, you are missing out. Maybe the best cast movie of this century. So what if the ending makes no sense. Nobody says they have to wrap it up nicely and live happy ever after. I especially like Cormac's writing style of leaving out quotation marks. Why bother with them?

Very different book compared to other McCarthy reads it has the same deep thinking but the violence sometimes takes over the book. I would recommend but not as high as some of his other books this one leaves us feeling helpless to control violence and for me that is a tuff pill to swallow I still have hope that enough people will care to stop the violence in our world Cormac seems to have lost that hope.

Okay, not quite, but...almost.

Let me say right at the start, this is a fine book, a compelling read, and well worth your time. Its entertainment with a kick and a moral...a thinking man's thriller that doesnt let up for a page.

So why the medicore rating?

If this were any other author, I'd probably give this book 4 stars, or maybe even 5, but because its Cormac McCarthy, I hold him to a higher--perhaps even impossible--standard. The standard of his own previous work, specifically, his novel *Blood Meridian.* Its unfair, I know it, an author usually has only one novel like *Blood Meridian* in him. But as any number of characters from McCarthy's own books will tell you, including the monstrous killer stalking this one, lifes not fair. No its not, not in the end.

Fact is, McCarthy already said everything he says in *No Country for Old Men* in *Blood Meridian,* only he said it better, more poetically, thunderously, and forever in the former. *Blood Meridian* is a novel for the ages--and *No Country for Old Men* is a novel for maybe two months or so. It reads much like a movie-script, and one can almost see this book turned into a blockbuster thriller--and, as such, its a perfectly legitimate, if watered-down re-statement of McCarthy's major themes. You almost get the feeling he was slumming it in this novel, dumbing it all down for the mass market, making his version of "Silence of the Lambs."

If you havent read *Blood Meridian* yet...read this book. It's the place to start--its the primer, an introduction to the futile struggle between good and evil. Then get yourself a copy of *Blood Meridian,* that's the post-graduate text.

For sheer page turning suspense, this book rates high. McCarthy wrote this like a screenplay, and it's really hard to put down.

From a literary perspective, the most interesting dynamic of No Country is the comparison of the three main characters, each of them men, and each of them dead (in some way). The sheriff, the oldest, and for whom, presumably, there is "no country," fails in the end, by giving up. His fear and his fatigue lead him in to retirement, rather than to justice. Not that he's especially fearful or especially weak--he's just as good as you or me, but he doesn't do the right thing. The villain, the strongest, whose violence is perfectly cold, perfectly calculating, but still somehow incomprehensible, follows his own interests, his own rules, his own plans without failing. But he is also proved helpless. And our hero, who finds great good luck and great danger at the same moment, is unable to let go of either.

The contract between the villain and the hero is especially fascinating. The sheriff foretells that fighting evil tends to bring everyone to evil's level, which proves partially true with our hero. But there is a significant difference. Both the hero and villain give similar statements regarding destiny and the inescapability of the past--what has come before determines the present. There is a subtle, but enormous difference. The villain thinks of this in terms of where he is--what he has done, and what others have done, determines the present situation, where he finds him self, and what his options are and will be. His life is a game, and he calculates to win. The hero is also a determinist, but not simply with respect to where he is. He also thinks of who he is. The past makes up the present, not just in circumstances, but in character. Life, therefore, is not simply a matter of strategy. Perhaps, understanding this, he is the only one of the three ready to die.

I didn't actually read the book, but listened to a book on tape version. It could be that the different voices helped me understand it better. I tried to read another of McCarthy's books, Blood Meridian, and found the lack of punctuation marks too distracting to read. However, when I listened to this, I found that the story was excellent and captivating. Apparently, there are flaws in the story, but I was too wrapped up in what was happening in the story to know or care. The sheriff's last monologue is boring compared to the rest of the story, but explains a great deal about the title of the book and perhaps the opinion of McCarthy himself.

This is a very fine novel. McCarthy uses the story to examine humanity. The setting is in West Texas and the storyline involves the drug trade, but this book is about the most important things a human being has to deal with in life and about individual character.

Like in Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," "deserve's got nothin' to do with it." We can't plot out life as we want it to be and books/movies that do don't teach us much.

McCarthy makes this story accessible and easy to follow. I'm a slow reader and finished in a day. His mastery of the medium is humbling. I wish I could do anything so well. Highly recommended.

What a tough review to write. The story is told through the eyes a sheriff whose realizes that the country is changing and he doesn't like or understand it. As you know by now, one of main characters stumbles upon a lot of money, by way of a botched drug deal. Then you've got a crazy man who is chasing the man who has the money and decides to kill anyone who even breathes the same air as the guy who has the money. The murder scenes are very detailed, which is fine and actually adds to the book. Biggest problem with the book is the last 1/4 of it doesn't tie in. There is no real conclusion. The sheriff rambles on for the last 50 pages about a medal he received in Vietnam that he doesn't think he deserved and how broke he is. For all the reader knows, the guy that did all the killing is still on the loose. The writing is superb, the characters development is masterfully done. But the story itself isn't brought to a real conclusion -- only a sheriff who recognizes that he needs to retire. All that said, the reader needs to decide for themselves. Personally, I would have saved my $14.

"No Country for Old Men" has been my introduction to Cormac McCarthy. I confess to having seen the film of the same name which I found mesmerising. The killer, Chigurh, was absolutely relentless. He was the personification of evil and a man not to be crossed.

In comparison, the book is less rewarding than the film. The scene is well established with Moss, the antelope hunter, stumbling across a major drug gang killing field in the Texas desert. It is here that he finds a suitcase containing $2.4 million. He promptly leaves the scene only to make the mistake of returning later that night to bring water to the one survivor of the gun fight who was pleading for help earlier in the day. This was to prove to be a fatal error. It is at this point that the reader is introduced to Chigurh and it is at this point that Moss's life begins to unravel.

McCarthy's writing style is terse and very lean. Indeed, when using contractions, the apostrophe is usually left missing. In conversations, it is often difficult to distinguish between which party is speaking. These techniques may be of a certain style but, as far as I am concerned, they serve no purpose. The English language can be used bluntly without having to resort to party tricks.

Overall, I found "No Country for Old Men" to be less than satisfying. For a book which started out so promisingly, its latter stages and conclusion were a let down.

Excellent audio book, read to perfection by gravel-voiced Ted Stetchschulte. There's a lot of decisions to make when you roll up on the aftermath of a major drug deal gone bad (dead people, drugs, millions of dollars)in a barren deserted area in West Texas. Lots of violence happens which I normally don't care for, but doesn't seem superfluous in the great writing and storyline. The characters were very vivid and the dialogue sunk you into the West Texas landscape like you were watching it all on a movie screen. I can see why they made this into a movie (I haven't seen it yet), hope they did the book justice.

After seeing the movie, I read the book. I didn't like the ending of the movie and hoped the book would be better. The book is very easy to read and it is not a long book. The author uses an odd writing style by never using quotation marks which makes it sometimes confusing when reading the dialogue. It's amazing how the movie is almost verbatim what is in the majority of the book including all of the dialogue! That's so unusual! It's a fun read and I'm sure many will disagree with me when I say that I don't think that this is a great book. I think the endings in the book and movie could have been a lot better. Sure, you can read a lot of things into the meaning of the ending, but I think that at the end of both the movie and book I was disappointed and thinking "that was it?".

No Country for Old Men by McCarthy is a tremendous thriller yet it is quite violent. If you are sensitive to violence, then I would say to bypass this novel. Otherwise, it does keep you on the edge of your seat.

I wouldn't say that this is McCarthy's best book, but it is a very compelling read which examines life's goals and the pursuit of those things which are going to make us happy and keep us alive to see another day.

It is a story with a western landscape, sheriffs, bad guys (especially one special character) and a string of dead bodies. You may not like the ending but you cannot say that it does not hold your interest.

Good thriller. Interesting study of character, motivation and luck (good and bad).

UPDATED NOTE:

The beauty of this thriller is not being told what is going to happen to our protagonist and his adversary. I attempted to discuss the themes of the story and not give away the storyline resulting in a spoiler. Some folks obviously either wanted more information or disagreed with my assessment of three stars. Though I thought that this McCarthy work was good; I can honestly say that the violence was off the chart. If you are comfortable with that, you might have given it a higher ranking. However, I found that part of the experience tough to handle. Still I would say that it is a worthwhile read if this does not bother you.

To me the Sheriff played a pivotal role in the story and the title had a lot to do with where he was in life and what he chose to value. It also was very much a story of deciding what is really in your best interests in the long run and what choices will enhance and/or lengthen your existence rather than curtail the longevity of your life.

If you want to relax and enjoy your reading or viewing experience and want to get away from the harsh realities of violence in our culture while doing so, then this novel might not be for you. If that sort of thing does not bother you, then you would enjoy this work for its skillfully told saga.

Bentley/2007

a terrific book. everyone agrees, so I'd like to speak to the part I didn't like..
1. totally FAKE that Moss would let the evil killer go free, in mid-book, when Moss had his shotgun trained on him. that was an obvious book-extender gimmick, and it kind of ruined my trust in the greatness of the author for the remainder of the book. You will notice that they erased this cheap trick from the movie,..I guess I wasn't the only one that complained about this error. Cormac,..our generation needs a Dostoevsky, not another generic best selling author. Please don't blow us off!

I've wanted to take a stab at a Cormac McCarthy novel for some time. When I heard the Coen brothers had adapted "No Country for Old Men," I knew my selection had been made for me. I scrambled quickly to read it.

As far as the book itself: Wow. It's terse and remorseless. You quickly learn not to get attached to a character. The style is inimitable. McCarthy's quoteless, plainspoken dialog takes a little getting used to. But once you get into the swing of it, it is deeply evocative of small-town Texas. It's really brilliant.

In terms of the movie, I simply love the casting. I spent the entire book thinking "Tommy Lee Jones." And there he is. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh? How perfect is that? Josh Brolin (Llewelyn Moss) and Woody Harrelson (Carson Wells) are two other welcome selections. But the choice that leaves me intrigued beyond no end is Glasgow's own (and personal favorite) Kelly Macdonald (State of Play, The Girl in the Cafe) as Odessan Carla Jean Moss. Now, that's some inspired casting.

I am a McCarthy fan, and for any McCarthy fan, you'll enjoy this book. It's violent, it's literary and the characters are well delineated and memorable.

My favorite McCarthy books are actually the less violent ones, such as "All the Pretty Horses" and "The Crossing." Though those books too have their violent scenes, they were less concentrated on violence qua violence than some other McCarthy books such as "Blood Meridian" and "Child of God," both of which I liked less because the violence simply became too much for me and overwhelmed the plot.

In "No Country for Old Men," McCarthy describes some of his most violent killings ever. In fact, the book is so violent that I doubt it could be made into a movie without a great cleansing. That said, the book is small enough and the narrative is compelling enough that the violence does not overwhelm it.

In brief, the story is about a local Texas boy, Llewelyn Moss, who stumbles onto $2 million in cash from a drug deal gone bad. He tries to keep the money and is pursued by a variety of thugs, including the psychopathic killer Anton Chighur. All of this is narrated by a local sheriff who tries to protect Moss and his family from the inevitable fallout of his decision to take the money. McCarthy uses this narrative platform to have the sheriff muse (and I do love McCarthy characters who muse) on the increasingly violent nature of American life, the loss of respect for authority in America and the hopelessness of reigning in the drug trade).

Overall, the novel worked well for me, and I do not think that any McCarthy fan would be disappointed.

No one writes evil like McCarthy. It's his point, his genius, his art, and in this book he gives us Chigurh, who incarnates that incomprehensible spirit we call evil. The only character in literature that comes up to this standard recently is Lecter. Even more, Chigurh is a force of nature, not to be understood or analyzed. He just is, and neither Moss nor anyone else can come up to his stature as a character, explain him away, or even begin to understand why he exists and what he exists for; it is why some readers find the end of this book a disappointment. I saw it as a further attempt by McCarthy to describe Chigurh. Redemption is futile in the presence of this kind of beast, who is also man. Chigurh is because he is. He kills with the same mechanical ease as man slaughters animals in an abbatoir. So... read this book for Chigurh. Think about him all you can and reflect on him as the archetype of modern man, if you dare.

Fast-paced, shoot-out-fueled story. Llewelyn Moss, out hunting, stumbles upon a bunch of shot-up bodies, finds $2.4 million in a bag and takes it. Soon Chigurh, a psychopathic force of nature, gets on his tail, as do many Mexicans and a corporate assassin. Many of the characters were trained in the Viet Nam war. Sheriff Bell, in charge of the Texas county where it happens, is old and experienced but is trained to keep the peace, not hunt down killers. Can he help Llewelyn and Llewelyn's girlfriend stay alive? Snapping dialogue and action, interlaced with philosophical musings about what has happened to our country due to narcotics and those with cold hearts. Chigurh essentially compares himself to a fatal disease that his victims have had the bad luck to contract. "It's a mess, ain't it, Sheriff?" "If it ain't it'll do till a mess gets here."

Overall, McCarthy does an excellent job of conveying his theme. He uses the characters to develop the plot and the storyline as well as his theme. McCarthy uses the character EdTom Bell, the Sheriff of Sanderson, to display his purpose for writing the novel: there is a pessimistic belief that there is little anyone can do about any negative sides of human nature. Cormac, through Bell, continues to remind readers that there is evil in the world. The irony is that Bell is not a pessimistic man. Neither is he apathetic about life. Instead, he reluctantly accepts the innate evil of human beings.
In his novel, we also see a variety of style. For example, McCarthy uses slang in his dialogue to illustrate the time period and setting of the story. He also does not use normal punctuation: he uses no quotation marks for dialogue, no apostrophes for contractions, only the occasional comma to indicate that a character is speaking. He also organizes his writing by characters. Throughout the story, McCarthy jumps from character to character to give the reader several perspectives and to develop the storyline. The plot revolves around three major characters: Llewellyn Moss, a self-confident Vietnam veteran who lives with his wife in the Texas desert; Ed Tom Bell, Sheriff of Sanderson; and Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer. Each of these characters' lives revolves around three major themes: violence, greed, and evil human nature.
The setting also plays a major role in developing his story. The novel takes place during the drug wars of the 1980s in Texas and the Texas-Mexico border. The way McCarthy displays these events is similar to the way Al Capone ruled Chicago in the 1920s with his reign over crime; and also the way cowboy outlaws controlled the west during early settlement. Another interesting idea is that such a rough and violent story takes place in such a rough and violent terrain. The 4x4 off road trucks are a symbol of the struggles of the area and the battle to survive each day.
This is another one of McCarthy's great works. He effectively conveys his theme and purpose for writing his novel. His characters are well developed throughout and help the reader understand the plot. With a unique style, he is able to capture the reader's attention and place him or her in that time period. In general, Cormac McCarthy has written an outstanding, yet unique story that is a thrilling read and an interesting work of literature.

a great book and a wonderful adjunct to the movie. For one thing, the movie doesn't mention that the protagonist was a sniper in Vietnam, which makes him a bit more equal to the psychopathic killer who is pursing him. After reading the book, there is greater appreciation of the movie and after seeing the movie one can visualize the characters in the book more sympathetically. Both go hand in hand.

I consider Cormac McCarthy's books a must read and they hold a special place in my library. In the novel "No Country for Old Men" I thought the story was powerful and a emotional story. A story that I will not soon forget. Midway through the book I was beginning to get tired of all the killings, but with the author's writing style he kept focused on the story and I was reminded that this was not a mass market thriller that I was reading. Mr. McCarthy was developing a ruthless story coupled with social observations, Texan's perception of disappointments and despair. Highly recommend this book.

...that hasn't been touched on already in these reviews.

Loved the book and I couldn't put it down. The "ending" surprised me...actually, the last 2/3rd's of the book surprised me, as it wasn't what I expected. But that's a good thing, at least in my opinion.

This was my first McCarthy book and I was thrown off a bit at first. Just the structure of the chapters, non-quoting of dialogue, and rapid cuts from one scene to the next. As someone who enjoys reading Faulkner, I enjoyed the challenge and it was second nature after a few chapters.

The characters are fantastic, especially Anton, about whom I wanted to know more after the novel ended.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I hear it aligns closely with the book. I'll have to move it up my Netflix queue.

Now I'm debating whether to move on to The Road, or the Border Trilogy. I'm guessing I can't go wrong either way.

In this novel Cormac McCarthy lays before us, one by one, the stepping stones to a tremendous amount of violence. McCarthy builds up three separate stories that seem unrelated until about seventy pages into the story. After I actually figured out what was going on and who each character was the book moved quickly through suspenseful scenes of violence. There are no female characters, which I'm pretty sure is the usual for McCarthy, but the novel feels like its missing something. The Sheriff was the only part of the book that really drew any emotion from me. Aside from that it just seemed like a lot of blood and shooting. This book does not read as easily as McCarthy's most recent novel, "The Road", which I would recommend to anyone. I respect McCarthy as an author though, and I would recommend this book to any man age 16 to 100.

When I saw the movie promo for No Country for Old Men, I knew I had to see it. I ended up seeing it four times. After the second, I learned that the book was by Cormac McCarthy.

I'd read The Road after I heard Oprah (or similar) raving about it. My wife said she thought it'd be up my alley. Man was she right!

Stunned by the pared-down narrative power of The Road, I announced my decision to get No Country for Old Men. My wife beat me to it and brought it home the next day.

So often the book is better than the movie, or vice versa. In this case, I actually think these two iterations form a perfect pair.

The book fleshes out details. The movie perfectly casts characters and settings.

John Steinbeck is my favourite author. This book is like a deeply darker version of him.

Like Steinbeck, McCarthy's writing is elegant and unpretentious and all the more powerful for these rare and laudable traits.

Like Steinbeck, McCarthy has a phenomenal ear for the argot of his characters and his dialogue fairly dances in your mind.

He pairs humour with tragedy like no-one I've read, and I'm steadily working through his entire oeuvre.

From what I've read so far, I think No Country for Old Men is about as about as good an introduction to McCarthy's work as you may find.

So I give it a massive thumbs up and strongly suggest you do yourself a favour and read it!

This novel was thrilling and it will keep you from wanting to continue flipping through the pages. What made this book fascinating was due to the fact that it was an action book that Moss would kill to get the money and escape from the people who also want to get the money from Moss. The main characters are very likeable and are very smart with every move that they make. Although, Chigurh was hunting down Moss, but he also wanted to prevent the bad people from taking all of the money to themselves. Chigurh was a lot more gruesome than Moss. Chigurh would be consider as a vicious killer, he would kill the person completely, by that I mean that he would not leave the body unless he knows for sure that they are dead. Though, both of these guys were not on the same team, but they still had a common mission that they and to complete. I highly recommend that people should read this novel because there are great imagery and a lot of literary elements that could capture your attention. I dislike that it was hard to follow the scenes and it was somewhat confusing. McCarthy is known for his short, easy read novels and the action in this book would want you to want to know more about the obstacles that the two main characters have to go through to get the money.

Moss, the hero, is a pretty good man who makes a bad decision. But the bad decision isn't taking the drug money he finds among the bodies. If he'd left it at that he might have gotten away with it. The bad decision is going back later that night with water for a dying drug guy that Moss is worried might still be alive, and suffering. This is when he gets spotted; this is the beginning of the inevitable end. In McCarthy's world you don't get second chances. In McCarthy's world being good is a real problem. (He laments it, but he still paints it.) I don't think I'm giving anything away here. You know where this book is going right away--but you still can't put it down. There's a rhythm to McCarthy's writing that is unmatched. His dialogue is wonderful. Any one who appreciates good story telling and superb writing will love this book. Those people dissing this book are actually rating themselves.

"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy is atmospheric, absorbing, often frightening and totally believable. Which would be enough to recommend any novel, but McCarthy's prose is sublime to boot. I'm not a huge fan of the ending (or the movie adaptation, for that matter), but it's still one of the best novels I've read in ages. I think the only book of McCarthy's that's better is The Road.

(Note also: McCarthy's writing style has changed a lot since the complicated metaphor-heavy days of Blood Meridian. If you were put off McCarthy because of his early writing, give his later stuff a try.)

An interesting subject for literary disquisition would be (if it doesn't already exist) a survey of the journey through fiction of the bogeyman. Naturally, such a survey would spend most of its time in the forest of the genres: the fairy tale, sci-fi, the western (e.g., Wilson in Shane, played on film so memorably by Jack Palance), and, of course, the thriller and the horror. But at least a chapter could be devoted to the bogeyman in mainstream, modernist literature. Could the archetype possibly be Popeye in Faulkner's Sanctuary? Or can we trace it further back? As I profess no special expertise, I cannot provide the answer to that question.
Regardless, in No Country for Old Men, McCarthy offers us a fine specimen in the person of Anton Chigurh (which apparently sounds a lot like "sugar".) Chigurh has all the necessary ingredients of the base model: (1) He's opaque. What are his reasons for doing what he does? In the words of the ramrod straight Sheriff Bell, who periodically appropriates space to muse on the nature of things: "They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. I don't know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I'd as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that's where this is goin." We know what Chigurh's motives are not: money, sex, cheap thrill, political extremism, religious mania - no, them's not why. What's why seems to be that Chigurh sees hisself as the agent of a remorseless destiny that gets set off by some pore mortal's improvident action and then can't shut of the consequences of. (2) He's indestructible. Like a Timex or a Terminator, he takes a likkin' and keeps on a-kickin'. Which leads to (3) He's a gonna get you.
To offset Chigurh, we have Bell, who can basically do no wrong and can also basically make no difference. He's dedicated his life to atoning for a lapse that no one in this world would consider a lapse, and his moral anguish couldn't be more of a contrast to Chigurh's whatever-it-is.
For the rest of No Place, we have an Elmore Leonard plot populated by Jim Thompson characters. No great shakes, but certainly page-turnable.

I would love to see more westerns set in modern times like this. This book is seat in 1980 on the Texas Mexico border and the wars involving the drug cartels are just starting to heat up. I could not put this book down for two seconds, unlike The Road which I read after No Country for Old Men and was disappointed. I say skip The Road and read No Country for Old Men.

I love how McCarthy breaks the all of the rules with No Country for Old Men. He would drive an English teacher crazy and the traditional plot goes to the wayside as well. This book demonstrates how the bad guy sometimes gets away and the main character does not always ride off into the sunset. The Coen Brothers also did a great job making this book into a movie. If you read the book and see the movie you will be pleased to find that Hollywood stayed true to the book. It's like McCarthy's character stepped directly out of the book and onto the silver screen.

I read 1/2 of this on my Kindle & listened to 1/2 of it while on my treadmill.
This book was a Super quick read & a must for any McCarthy fan. It's not as dry as some of his other books, which I found refreshing.
If you're a fan of the movie (which I am...BIGTIME!!) you'll really enjoy the book. I say this because it has a little bit more of everybody in it.
The wife has more speaking lines & her scene at the end w/ Chigur (sp?) is different than the movie.
Also, you see a bit more of Chigur in the book, which is GREAT because the movie left me wanting more.
So if you want more of the movie, read the book. End of story.

Maybe my expectations were too high going in. I've heard a lot of good things about the author, loved the movie, etc. I read this sucker in like two days so it is a quick read/page turner and a pretty solid story. I usually like stripped down, simple books but I found his writing style very off putting.

I don't understand the lack of quotations and apostrophes. Why? Is this supposed to be more artisitic or simple? I didn't like that at all and his dialogue back and forth with numerous one liners between the characters made for a fast but very confusing read. I lost track of who was talking most of the time and had to go back and try to figure it out. Every character has the same speech pattern and sounds the same. That is not good writing. Each phrase is interchangeable and that is lame and lazy on his part.

I really liked the sheriff as a character and his innner dialogue and some of the themes/nuances are powerful but why does he describes with so much detail when it is not needed?

--He sat on the bed and grabbed one boot with his right hand and pulled. It came off and he shook out the blood then put it down on the carpeted floor and then put his hand on his leg and then grabbed his other boot and pulled. It came off and he placed it on the bed beside him.

Something like that is pretty common in this book. Why not just say, 'he took his boots off' and be done with it? I don't get it. This is our greatest living author? Are you kidding me? I weep for the publishing world if this is true.

Briefly, at the outset, anyone who is actually wondering if they should just wait until the paperback is issued, should do so; there is no good reason to buy the hardcover of this, unless, of course, like me, you can't help yourself. I'll elaborate at some length...

I greatly admire Cormac McCarthy's prose, and I think there's value to a good crime thriller sometimes; the idea of McCarthy writing a crime thriller had me a bit worried, but I found I greatly enjoyed the experience of reading this, and have to ultimately say that McCarthy has intelligently engaged with the form of the thriller, without seriously compromising himself by stooping to write one. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN creates a strong, likeable character for the reader to identify with, an "average" but intelligent, likeable, and determined man, who steals money from the scene of a failed drug transation; he then sets him on a collision course with a memorable, articulate villain who joins Hannibal Lecter and Judge Holden in the annals of late-20th-century/early 21st "attractively evil" characters, who is hunting for the money and killing anyone who inconvenieces or annoys him along the way. (Note: mild spoilers follow). The trajectory of the novel does not quite lead us where we expect (a final showdown), which leaves one wondering what McCarthy is saying about our own position re: such a text and our desires of it (which is why I consider this an intelligent engagement with the form of the thriller, and not a thriller per se), and asking ourselves (alongside Bell, the retiring Sheriff who serves as the third major character in the book) what lessons are to be learned from a world where narratives of good-vs.-evil end so problematically. There's much to contemplate here; do we choose between impotent and compromised virtue, pure, efficacious, and uncompromising evil, or do we simply stand in the middle of the road between them and get run over? They're worthy questions, and there are many beautiful passages in the novel (spare though it may be) that lead us to their framing. HOWEVER: I really didn't care much, at the end of it all. It was fun; I enjoyed reading it (which took me about a day and a half); I read a few passages twice; I thought for awhile about its messages; then I traded it at a used bookstore the night after I bought it for a collection of short stories by Flannery O'Connor, which I will get far more out of (tho' I won't read them as compulsively or as quickly). Perhaps I'll look at it again in a few years' time. I doubt it very much, though. The moral questions framed by the work are framed much more interestingly in BLOOD MERIDIAN, and the thriller-like aspects of the novel won't serve to engage a reader after the book has been read once. And tho' it may be appropriate for a novel with such a title, some of Sheriff Bell's ruminations strike me as too sweetly sentimental: I am not as nostalgic for "old fashioned virtue" as McCarthy is; and some of the commentary on the evils of the drug trade seem a little silly given the far greater evils going on in the world at present.

Really, the measure of how much you like the book would be best framed thus: Clint Eastwood should direct the film adapation -- it's perfectly suited to his talents and his current mode of filmmaking. Apologies to Mr. McCarthy for saying so, but it's true...

I would love to see more westerns set in modern times like this. This book is seat in 1980 on the Texas Mexico border and the wars involving the drug cartels are just starting to heat up. I could not put this book down for two seconds, unlike The Road which I read after No Country for Old Men and was disappointed. I say skip The Road and read No Country for Old Men.

I love how McCarthy breaks the all of the rules with No Country for Old Men. He would drive an English teacher crazy and the traditional plot goes to the wayside as well. This book demonstrates how the bad guy sometimes gets away and the main character does not always ride off into the sunset. The Coen Brothers also did a great job making this book into a movie. If you read the book and see the movie you will be pleased to find that Hollywood stayed true to the book. It's like McCarthy's character stepped directly out of the book and onto the silver screen.

Cormac McCarthy is perhaps the most skilled and provocative author living today. I was first introduced to his works by a university professor, and thank god. No Country for Old Men is the story of the modern day west, the value of keeping your word, the lust of money, and death. The movie does the book justice, no doubt but there is something more in the book. There is perfectly painted prose, and an eeriness that keeps you turning pages. Highly recommended

Overall I felt that No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy, was an extraordinary, intriguing novel. I enjoyed reading the novel tremendously, and give it a five star rating! Although it can be confusing at times, once immersed in the plot, it is an extremely captivating book that will keep you on the edge of your seat. McCarthy's carefully created characters provide and interesting storyline. After learning of each characters personality thorough the novel, you can almost predict what their next action will be. I think that No Country For Old Men is one of the greatest Modern American novels written to date. It was the winner of the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is obvious by these prestigious recognitions that this fantastic novel is regarded as a Masterpeice by almost everyone. Although hard to place, McCarthy establishes a common theme throughout the novel. I think that the authors message to the audience would be that sometimes we will be overcome or defeated, even if we try our hardest to suceed. To conclude, I would recommend this book to anyone. It is a fast-paced, exacting thriller that, although somewhat violent, was a pleasure to read. McCarthy has captured the badlands of Texas and northern Mexico with a passion most writers either could not muster or would not dare.

This novel grips you on page one and doesn't let go till the end. It's really a simple story but simple in the sense that the greatest art is the simplest art. McCarthy makes it look easy, but the novel is an extremely skilled journey through a myriad of considerations. As a writer, McCarthy is unexcelled among current practitioners. His dialog is so accurate and authentic that your head will spin. His ability to build tension and excitement is superb. All writers can learn from McCarthy. All readers can enjoy.

Picture one of those super-violent torture movies (Hostel, Saw, The Hills Have Eyes, etc.), slap on a veneer of philosophical thinking and a dose of genuine writing skill and you've got a pretty good idea of what you'll find in Cormac McCarthy's neo-western epic "No Country for Old Men." Perhaps it's not quite fair to equate this book to those torture movies since there are no scalpel-or-hacksaw-wielding maniacs, creepy desert mutants, or elaborate traps that will force you to cut off your own foot to escape, but I do feel that the comparison is appropriate because make no mistake, these characters are being made to suffer, and suffer they do. Brain matter and viscera spray the walls more than once, the phrase "right between the eyes" becomes a grim - and frequent - reality, and bodies are so riddled with bullets that it feels like watching Sonny Corleone get shot up at the turnstile over and over again. The villain even finds some creatively gruesome uses for a cattle gun.

That villain is a ruthless killer by the name of Anton Chigurh (which is apparently pronounced like `sugar') - and boy is he a nasty one. There are only a handful of literary villains powerful enough that their presence can give you goose-bumps, and Chigurh is one of them. Too bad he lacks the personality and/or back-story of, say, a Hannibal Lecter that would have made him qualify as a truly classic bad guy. Caught up in his path is Llewellyn Moss, a hardened and hard-up Vietnam vet who comes across more than two million dollars and a load of heroin in the back of a van whose drivers have been shot up and left for dead. Why was the van's cargo left behind by the people who did the shooting? We aren't meant to ask questions like that, I guess. Needless to say, Llewellyn takes the money and runs afoul of both Chigurh and the Mexican dope-dealers who are also after it - endangering not only his life, but that of his saintly young wife, Carla Jean. Yet while all of the action takes place between Chigurh and Llewellyn, the main protagonist is actually Sheriff Bell, a WWII vet whose musings on the carnage left by Chigurh frame the novel and help get across its themes. Too bad his storyline feels so disparate since he's perpetually two or three steps behind the people he is chasing.

"I believe that whatever you do in your life it will get back to you. If you live long enough it will." Punishment is a major theme in "No Country for Old Men." Are the bad things that happen to us actually retribution for past sins? How, then, do we explain the bad things that happen to good people? Why are they being punished too? Does God exist, and if so how could he allow such terrible things to occur? These are meaty questions that deserve to be asked, but ultimately this novel is too cynical to be very poignant. I never would have thought it possible for McCarthy to write a bleaker book than his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Road," but darned if this one isn't it. The difference, and what makes "The Road" a masterpiece and "No Country" a misfire, is that every page of "The Road" has a consuming sense of hope burning through to the reader even in its darkest moments. "No Country for Old Men" is just a relentless downer.
Grade: C-

Thanks to the reviewer who mentions Yeats' poem; it does deepen our understanding of the book and some of its symbolism.
In general, this is a chilling, nightmarish treatment of determinism and entropy. McCarthy is saying that we live in an indifferent universe in which our choices cannot predict outcomes, create a cascade of effects and often lead to disaster and despair. Not for the faint of heart or those would like to believe in divine purpose.

an absolute page turner. I read it in an afternoon after i had seen themovie trailer. It was the first Mccarthy book i have read. it was also my first Kindle download. i was hooked after downloading the preview chapter. the characters develop nicely and you can see yourself perhaps makimg similar poor choices. the prose left me feeling the southwestern sun and sensing therise of dust from the dirt roads. the ending felt real to me . . .no winners . people recognizing that humans have their limits and there isno such thing as a free lunch .

Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" is a tale on many levels. On the literal level, it is a simple plot of a man who finds $2.4 million in cash after a drug-deal gone wrong and his race to hide from the man trying to get the money from him (Anton Chigurgh). A splendid cat-and-mouse game, the novel progresses with each stop that Moss makes on his journey to get further away from Anton. Stuck in the middle is Sheriff Thom Bell. The sheriff, who is an "old-timer", is new to this string of violence that he is investigating. Disguised as almost as a Western/crime/thriller novel, "No Country for Old Men" tells the story of a man becoming aware of the changes in society and realizing that maybe he isn't fit for what's up ahead. I believe this book is perfect for when it was written, as we are now at a turning point in our society and the problems that we face now and will face up ahead are going to need to be solved by those who are willing to accept new ideas and make compromises. This society certainly has become a country not fit for old men. (There is a poem by William Butler Years called "Sailing to Byzantium" and the first line is "That is no country for old men..." although I'm about 75% sure this is where McCarthy got the title of the book from, I'd like for someone to confirm it for me.) "No Country for Old Men", in my opinion, will go down as a book that will be remembered as a staple of our society's changing face.

I can see why the movie would get such awesome reviews, this book was super intense! This is another book my husband got over the holiday, that he hasn't yet read.

I read this book in 2 days! It is a real crime thriller that you just cannot put down. The author's style is so distinctive and the character development really gets you attached to each indiviual's plight.

I'm not sure I'll see the movie after reading this since it was so good. I tend to be afraid that the movie will ruin the book's images my mind creates.

Unlike other reviews I'll stick to the review itself and not the retelling of the inner notes of the publisher. This is McCarthy's first true crime noir thriller and what a thrill it is. The story though simple in plot is never dull and the characters as usual for McCarthy find themselves over their head very quickly (with the exception of Chigurh). Only sheriff Bell (a.k.a. Lord Jim) seems to realize this, but even he cannot alter the path life has set for himself. The dialog that has made McCarthy famous is as strong as ever, and as sparse. The writing is sparse and one notices immediately that the author has purposely left out much of the atmospheric narrative that is found is all of his earlier novels. Chigurh is by far one of the strongest and most interesting characters McCarthy has ever created. And as usual the one we learn least about. But all the reader need know of this guy is found in the first chapter.

This is a quick read. Fans of McCarthy will notice that the narrative diction is well pruned and reminiscent of Hemingway in comparison to his earlier works, so you can leave the dictionary on the shelf.

Finally, The New Yorker and the New York Times took this opportunity to trash not only No Country for Old Men, but McCarthy's overall canon. One complaint they had was that he is too violent, too theatrical, too melodramatic, and there aren't enough well-developed female characters. Not just in this novel but all of his novels. I wonder if they are at all familiar with the reality of the eras and the environments that McCarthy writes about. McCarthy has demythified the old west. And it is well over due. I also read where these two publishers enjoyed Harry Potter. Well. I suppose a balanced novel of character genders is more important than structured plot, narrative, and overall literary value. What do I know. I'm just a simple reader.

In "No Country for Old Men," Sheriff Bell expresses bewilderment about the carnage left in the wake of a drug deal that went utterly wrong.

He wonders what it is to be an officer of the law, now that crime and criminals seem to have hit new depths of depravity.

He says, "I ain't sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I don't know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they'd have to build an annex on to hell."

Punctuating this social elegy are his ruminations on goodness, the decline of polite society, and whether basic virtues like kindness and respect retain influence.

Certainly, Bell is one of the dispossessed old men implied by the book's title.

Incidentally, the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen is a close adaptation of McCarthy's novel. And the consensus so far is that it's a brilliant film -- in which the Coens bring their characteristic inverted sense of Americana to a contemporary western tale.

It conforms tightly, but not fully, to conventions within Western stories -- both written and on film.

It's a highly visual work, and the novel unfolds in linear form, deriving its force from what characters say and do.

Bell's character forms part of a triangle which includes Llewlyn Moss who foolishly, but understandably, removes two million dollars from the scene of the botched deal.

The other third of the triangle is Anton Chigurh, emblematic of murderous, implacable evil, from whom Moss is on the run.

Chigurh is behind most of the dramatic tension, which McCarthy maintains at an almost unbearable level by also keeping readers mindful of his thematic purpose.

The fullness of this purpose is so closely tied with the resolution that we are able to identify and fully appreciate it only once we've reached the story's end.

It's an urgently relevant theme in today's world, and without giving anything away, it has to do with compromise at a personal and moral level.

In Cormac McCarthy's border world—the geography of his last four novels—the actions of his characters invite a wide spectrum of repercussions that don't question the existential, ontological, and epistemological fabric of a people so much as torture it to death. The actions—both extraordinary and banal, instinctive and ill-advised, alike—swing reactions that transcend neat, common frameworks of morals, values, and if guard is down, meaning itself. McCarthy's elegant, reoccurring presentation of this tension is given full, brutal expression in 1985s Blood Meridian, a novel I believe is quite frankly more horrifying in detail and scope than Ahab's great white vengeance coupled with Kit Moresby's existential meltdown in the Sahara. It's been seven years since we last heard from McCarthy [City of the Plains, the rope that tied up the Border Trilogy], and his Salinger-esque penchant for publicity fuels the mystique of the man, as well as each little town along the Mexican border. McCarthy turned seventy-two on July 20. His new novel, No Country for Old Men, is scheduled to be released around the first of August. We now know that something has indeed been brewing down around the dusty threshold of the arcane.

While hunting antelope outside of Sanderson, Texas, Llewelyn Moss (a welder and Vietnam veteran) happens upon the scene of a heroin deal gone awry. After taking a case filled with over $2 million, his life takes a turn for the worse, as hitmen, drug lords, and law officers begin their search for the money, drugs, and Moss.

No Country for Old Men is the love story of Moss and his girlfriend Carla Jean. A relationship where inattention overflows from a comfortable selfishness; an empathetic love almost rises to the surface, but only after a very bad decision. The novel the ghost story of Sheriff Bell, whose haunting past relentlessly continues to shape the course of his life, the product of a regrettable decision. It is the coming-of-age story of both Moss and the elderly Bell; each making a transition into a clearer understanding of the world, but occurring far too late, and only then arrived at through terminally damaging decisions. It is a story of belief and faith Anton Chigurh, not in the traditional sense, but a belief and faith based on a strong, calculated will. No Country for Old Men is about decisions—decisions and the very different places they come from, and go to, in the face of a pure, determined will.... -Greg Matherly, Arc Magazine

I have read a few books by McCarthy and this was up to the usual high standards. In fact, it is the easiest read of the three I've read by him so for anyone that is new to this author, I'd recommend this as a primer. The book does differ from the movie in certain ways and I must say, without spoiling either, I'm surprised at the differences are as significant as they are ( I'd seen the movie first and clearly the movie makers had different intent). Bottom line, a very good book by a unique and talented author.

I just finished the audio version of this book yesterday. The book is well written and it pulls you in in a dark kind of way. It's like you feel when you pass a bad accident along the road and you know better than to look but you kind of feel drawn to look anyway. I do not mean that the book is just cheap gore, it's more like the wreck - it just feels real. You know that given different elements of time and chance that it could be you.

What has stayed with me most is the decision Moss makes at the very start of the story to take the drug money. It seems so reasonable at the time, to make a spur of the moment decison to take a bag of money that is obviously drug money but that isn't yours. I found myself wanting badly for things to work out for Moss, for his wife, for their future. It's such a simple decision, but it leads to such dire consequences for so many people.

I think the take home for me is that some decisions, made quickly, can define our lives. You need a higher standard than your gut, a higher standard even than your heart or your conscience. Late in the book Sheriff Bell also reveals a decision that has defined how he looks at his life. "I don't know what to say about that."

The authorial perspective, in the person of a small town sheriff, sustains a running philosophical commentary while impotently observing the perdition of a latter day American Adam, ...to the effect that nothing makes sense anymore; and that, caught in this sensual cacophony of idiot consumerism and avarice, all neglect monuments of unaging intellect, ...Tradition, i.e., Jesus, and enlightenment institutions of civilization, as in The Law.
The encompassing trope is "war", ...over heroin and the profits therefrom; but, emblematic of most any strategic commodity (notably oil) within the capitalist system. All the antagonists are warriors in one or another of America's military escapades during its "century of war". Two do battle on behalf of opposing gangsters with HQ's in Dallas skyscrapers, just like Haliburton et. al.. The third, the American archetype, is a soldier of fortune, a freebooter, a lone wolf, a cowboy. The killing, as in all our wars, is massive and wholesale. And the technology of battle as horrifying as the soullessness of those who wield it.
And the end of it all has the sheriff despairing of the civic world, law and patriotism, in favor of recurring to the elemental micro-world of wife and lover.

I had seen the movie before reading the book, and had heard someone in the DVD documentary say that the movie follows almost identically with the book, that in fact the book reads like a treatment for a script. I bought the book in the hope that the original story would add depth to what I was already familiar with, and it has.
One thing I couldn't help but notice, something unusual in the way the text is presented, is that the quotation marks are missing. Such an observation has a ring of Carson Wells to it, with his attempts at humor in pointing out that one of the floors of a building seems to be missing. But they are, the quotation marks are missing. I also noticed that my copy is from England, with the price UK £7.99 on the back cover. I've read other books from there and they have quotation marks. German books use a different kind of quotation mark, kind of like two 'less than' and 'greater than' symbols together, <<Like this>>, he said.
I don't know if anyone else has pointed this out. I see that there have been five hundred and three reviews made of this book and I am not going to go through them all to see if I am creating a redundancy.

*PLOT SPOILERS*

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It's written in the style i would expect from Cormac McCarthy, a quick easy read. McCarthy does an excellent job of painting the early 80's border towns and an even better job of explaining character intentions through the eyes of other characters as well as through their actions. I was a little displeased that one of my favorite characters was executed so quickly (Welles). At the same time i found it unusual that i began to care more about what happened to Chigurh than i did about what happened to Moss. That left me very happy with the ending.

I thought I was going to get a thriller when I first heard of this. Instead I got a pseudo-sequel to COLD MOUNTAIN set in 1980 Texas, and I have rather low opinions of COLD MOUNTAIN. It was difficult to follow the story due to McCarthy's decision to not only avoid using quotation marks to identify dialogue (a move I've always considered to be a pretentious affectation), but also commas, apostrophes, and proper spelling, such as not capitalizing "English" or using "livingroom" instead of "living room" and "mam" instead of "ma'am." I don't know if this is something McCarthy does in all his books or this was a one-time deal, but it was a major turnoff and made the experience grueling rather than enjoyable. I also didn't see the relevance of the italicized monologues of Sheriff Bell at the beginning of each chapter/section, as he tended to ramble on about life after World War Two and how it wasn't uncommon to see 22-year-olds as ordained ministers or 25-year-olds as sheriffs of counties the size of Delaware. Hopefully its movie adaptation (which I legitimately pity the Coen Brothers for having to wade through) is more accessible.

What's up with people writing their own books to review this book? Have you ever seen such long reviews on the store? Read a few of these behemoths and I think you'll join me in agreeing that the old adage about the reverse proportionality of profundity and long-windedness still holds true.

And to think that all this verbage is about such a spare and stream-lined masterpiece...

This book is the best new thing I have read in the past five years. Books like No Country for Old Men make me wish I could write. (Never fear, I won't try and start here.)

Cormac McCarthy lights a fuse in the first pages that will have you burning through it to the end. He also delivers the biggest sucker punch since the one Hitchcock threw with Psycho.

Buy this book. You'll want to keep your copy.

This is the best book to come out this year. This is a story that means something from a writer who knows what he's doing.

I give No Country for Old Men my highest recommendation.

In 1980, Llewelyn Moss hunts antelope in Western Texas near the Rio Grande. However, instead of locating a buck, Moss finds several corpses, a major heroin stash and $2.4 million. Moss figures finder's keepers and takes the cash leaving behind the dead and the illegal drugs figuring both could be more trouble than he wants to deal with.

However the cartel that owns the money sends former Special Forces soldier Wells to find the loot and kill the thief. They also send vicious killing machine, psychopathic poster boy Chigurh to insure the thief is brutalized. Finally, aging Sheriff Bell seeks Moss for questioning and to keep him alive.

Several years have passed since Cormac McCarthy completed his fabulous Border Trilogy. The highly regarded author returns to the same locale with the thrilling NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. The four prime testosterone players are potent protagonists who the audience anticipates a convergance while wondering who will be left standing once the war turns full throttle. Fans of modern-day High Noon will enjoy this action-packed western thriller from the moment Moss becomes the prey of two totally different professionals and the title character sheriff ready to retire, but still doing his duty.

Harriet Klausner

I loved loved loved this book.

The plot, the setting and most of all the characters were all written perfectly.

The plot was good because unlike most stories where the protagonist, who is usually an ordinary man who stumbles onto millions of dollars and end up doing idiotic, unfathomable and sometimes superhuman things such as kill everyone along the way in order to keep the money, and then somehow get away with it; here the protoganist (Llewelyn Moss) is only trying to stay alive for as long as he can with the money he found because he knows that so long as he has the money, they will never stop hunting him. As Llewelyn said: If you lost $2 million dollars, when would you stop looking for it? Never.

Since the money is from a drug deal gone wrong, the setting is perfect and beliavable in the bare deserted Texas prairie. McCarthy does such a wonderful job at capturing the various main characters personalities that even though the novel is written in dialogue form, you can tell which character is talking without him describing who it is. The only minor problem is that with so many characters, the characters with minor yet vital roles can be a little hard to follow.

The only thing more perfect than this book was the adaptation of the novel into the Coen brother's movie. Although for the most part faithful to the book, there are some changes in the movie version. I usually don't like the movie adaptation of a novel, but this one was done so perfectly that it might even surpass the novel itself. The portrayal of the character by Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones could not have been more perfect.

If you read this book, I guarantee you would want to run out and watch the movie. But if you can only do one, I would suggest you watch the movie. The movie captures the story and provides you with the visual perfectly.

If there was a book that truly pushed me to finish it it was No Country For Old Men. The story is simple yet intricate filled with twists and turns. Bell is the driving force of the plot and Chigurh keeps the story unique and action packed. It will shock you, anger you, different emotions will fill your soul and change you. Violent, grotesque, passionate these are words that sum up No Country For Old Men. I think there needs to be a prequel with only one main character Chigurh.

This book really resonated with me. I think it was the down home, colloquial dialogue that made me feel as though I was actually in small town Texas (and isn't that the best way to experience Texas, in its small towns?). This is true Americana.

An earlier reviewer mentioned the - it's a mess aint it. It'll do til a mess gets here - line. I think that's my favorite line of the year.

I'm guessing my next statement doesn't apply to most McCarthy fans - this is not a book for those who want nice tidy endings. You're left hanging, wondering about what truly happened to the characters. But that's life, ain't it? Some folks come into our lives for a brief period of time and then they're gone, leaving us to wonder what happened to them.

Page-turner thrillers are rarely cause for protracted philosophical discussion, but "No Country" accomplishes just that.

Sheriff Bell's monologues provide a welcome respite from cat-and-mouse. "On the nose" dialogue need not always be a faux pas. It just needs to be extremely well-written. And McCarthy can make nostalgia and sour grapes sound like poetry.

It's a dark novel but it's somehow full of life. Masterful work!

Reading Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men" could ruin you from ever wanting to pick up another novel again. Hours after finishing this book, a gift from my oldest son, all I want to do is sit and think about everything that transpired in this tale.

I've enjoyed Mccarthy's novels, particularly BLOOD MERIDIAN and CHILD OF GOD, but there's something badly wrong with this latest effort. For one thing, about half the novel seems to have gone missing. For another, the long-suffering reader gets no payoff at all... the novel doesn't end, the pages just stop coming. The ruminations of an implausibly elderly sheriff named Bell run the gamut from pointless to senseless, and the main villain, "Sugar," who is initially quite terrifying, ultimately becomes a verbose bore not much different from Bell. [I know, I know, Bell and Sugar are supposed to be similar in many respects.] Mccarthy still does a good job of reproducing conversations, but when those conversations go nowhere, reading them can be crushingly tedious. I simply could not endure the interminable conversation between the character Moss and a teenage hitchhiker; I had to skip it, and I suspect Mcarthy knew most readers would because he then slaps the reader in the face as hard as an author can, on the next page.

Readers who get through this piffle are the ones who probably deserve that slap, not the wiser ones who bailed out (like Bell back in WWII) when the situation got hopeless.

This is a rare case of the movie being better than the book. The movie made me think about it for days afterwards and I absolutely loved the symbolism, characters, cinematography, message, ets. So, being an ardent reader I decided to pick up the novel. I have never read Cormac McCarthy before but if his other books are like this one I don't want to read any more of his work.

I found his curt, simple dialogue to be irritating. A character would say a few words, then the other one would say a few words, and the "conversation" would continue like this. Not every exchange was like this but there were enough to be quite annoying. It was also bothersome that at times it was difficult to follow who was saying what. McCarthy rarely helps us out by saying, "Moss replied," or "Bell said". This may not seem like a big deal, but I found it phenomenally distracting and I had to re-read on a number of occasions.

Next, the lack of quotation marks was also distracting. I tried to get past it at first but it bothered me more and more as the story went on.

McCarthy also had a tendency for run-on sentences. As someone else pointed out, he consistently used the word "and" to piece sentences together and the sentences just rambled on.

Lastly, although written well, alot of the dialogue is plain tedious. Bell's soliloquys are just boring and you grow tired of his whining about things (I liked how in the movie he isn't portrayed as such a griper). I thought many of the conversations in the book worked MUCH better on screen as well. For example, in the book, when Moss speaks with the hitchhiker, and when Bell visits an old family member, I didn't think I was going to be able to stay awake.

I suppose I could see how others could like this book, but you have to be prepared for McCarthy's writing style. There was really nothing about his unique style that I found redeeming.

I wouldn't have heard about this book unless I has seen the ads for the movie. The movie looked good but the book is a masterpiece. I went out and bought this book and couldn't put it down. It is hard to read because of the writing style but other than that it is flawless. Easily the best book I have read this year. I can't wait to see the movie because from the reviews it looks like they stayed to the story and even used some of the great dialogue. Ten stars.

Here is a great book by Cormac McCarthy. It has been made into a movie. I'm looking forward to seeing it. It will be very interesting to see if it tracks the book. In fact, to see if it can track the book.

This was my first exposure to Cormac McCarthy's novels. The first thing that struck me was that the man never saw a quotation mark he liked. Nor a lot of complete sentences. Believe it or not, this style carried over into dialog. Very few he saids. Very few references to proper names. Complete sentences as scarce as hen's teeth. Run on sentences like pebbles on a beach. Not since e e cummings have we had such rebellion against Strunk and White, the writing guide.

But guess what. It works. What a narrative this is! From the time his character Llewelyn Moss finds a couple of trucks of dead and dying drug runners in the desert and skips off with a couple of million dollars of drug money, and all through the heart pounding chase by the minions of the self-described owners of the money, McCarthy, with his staccato style, batters the senses and storms the emotions, virtually from the first page to the last. And all the while, sprinkling Southwestern homespun philosophy -- McCarthyisms I came to call them -- that kept me pondering and smiling.

I've tried in this report to mimic McCarthy's style. To a degree. A poor job I have to admit. But maybe you'll get the picture. Or not. Unless you read the book. Do it. You'll like it.

I'm about the spoil a part of the ending. For good reason; to complain about how it was written.

All along, the narrative moves in the first person between Chigurgh, Bell, and Moss. Each passage so vivid you can see the muzzleflashes, smell the powderburns. The suspense builds till Chigurgh catches up to Moss with the red-head in the motel. (As soon as he picks up the red-head, you sorta get the feelin' it's over...)

But the description of how Moss and the girl go out is really disappointing. I mean, we only hear third hand about how he goes. From a witness who tells the deputies. No muzzleflashes, no smell of fireworks in the early morning air. What caliber was the weapon that nailed Moss? Did Chigurgh use the silencer? Did Moss get it in the face first, or was he wounded first and then tagged?

I know the navel-gazers will argue that I'm missing the point here. Well, maybe I am. But I want to know how Moss gets it.

This novel appears to me to be equal parts Dashiel Hammett and Jim Thompson. Those guys wouldn't have shied away from the death of a protagonist. And I know McCarthy's not shying away so much as making some bigger point...I don't friggin' care. Give me the big car chase leading up to the shootout at the docks before the bad guys get away by faking their own death and smiling into the camera thereby setting up the sequel...at least a little of it.

This book starts off great. The premise is simple- a man who is not evil, but IS flawed, finds an isolated truck, along with a bunch of dead bodies and a lot of money. He knows dangerous men will likely come after the money. But he takes it anyway, and sets off a chain of horrendous events. The writing is spare, stark and grim. The themes are Biblical. The characters are indelible. The middle passages percolate with a ruthless momentum. The main antagonist is a brutally logical and relentless adversary. The flawed guy on the run makes you root for him even when he makes stupid decisions and puts his loved ones in harm's way. The weary sheriff stuck between the two makes you feel his fear, and the courage in the face of this fear. So, what's the problem? Well, the novel percolates and percolates . . . and then runs off the rails. The fate of one of the main three characters is handled off-page!! OFF-PAGE!! The writing leads up to a semi-cliffhanger, then the narrative jumps ahead and another character fills in the reader about what happened. We were led to believe the author would SHOW us what was about to happen. From this point, about two-thirds of the way in, the book stubbornly refuses to make any concessions to reader expectations. Granted, the author is not obligated to have the characters meet in some contrived, Hollywood-style three-way confrontation. But this alternate ending betrays the narrative and is deeply unsatisfying. I literally looked at the book at 3-in-the-morning and said, "That's it?" So there you have it. This book starts so well it makes you wish the author had a similarly great ending.

I read a lot, and I am not really impressed with a lot of what I read. But I consider this a great book. This really made me think about our society and what is happening to it. The story and its landscape is very stark and while there is a lot of symbolism that can be explored, McCarthy sees clearly that there is something wrong with our current society, and it is not just something that can be addressed with laws. It is something in the underpinnings that makes the story itself imaginable, but more frighteningly, makes this story based in some shreds of reality.

Thank goodness we have authors like Cormac McCarthy who are willing to face the badness in ourselves and our culture that we are allowing to take over. He leaves you no place to hide and the realizations he produces are worth infinitely more than any standard liberal pablum, let alone the conservative deception. My only reservation is that he is more implicitly polemical here than in previous books, which though I agree with him, was a little distracting and unnecessary. Perhaps that is because, like me, he sees the current situation as dire. We'll either get or we won't, Cormac. The evidence could not be more clear, if we will but see it. But enough philosophy - this is one hell of a novel! His use of the language and his expression are faultless and his characterization is dead on. A compelling read!

With so many other reviews, I'll keep mine brief. Cormac's style, while some might find it hard to read, practically goes back to basics and proves what good writing is really about, and it isn't fancy words. It's descriptions of setting, detail, diologue, and blatantly telling the truth. No hints or working around bogus twists or forshadowing that can't be detected. Simple. Hemingway knew it. McCarthy knows it. And obviously they're good at what they do. Sure, instead of saying 'there was' or 'he saw' he simply states: Shadows of the clouds (or something like that) because he doesn't need such openings; clearly we know the person saw or there were these things. And I love how he described simple behavior numerous times, as in 'he stood looking around' and my favorite, 'he listened.' Great stuff!

If you like your conflicts fully resolved, you may want to look elsewhere; if you're bothered by unconventional punctuation, you may be irritated by this book; if you despise jump cuts and point of view shifts, you may find yourself rereading sections of this book to catch your bearings. Otherwise, however, you may find this one of the most original books you've read in years.

The story begins when Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a drug shootout while out antelope hunting. He follows a trail out into the desert at the end of which he finds a dead man and 2.4 million dollars. What he doesn't find (until it's too late) is the bug hidden in the money. Soon he has a dauntless hit man on his tail. The bodies pile up like cord wood. This part of the story is pretty conventional. Llewelyn Moss is likable and smart. He seems to anticipate the killer's every move, until he meets a fourteen-year-old, female hitchhiker, who proves to be too much of a distraction.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, the focus switches from Llewelyn to Sheriff Bell, who's trying to save Llewelyn from himself. There's more quirky point of view stuff going on here as McCarthy has Bell tell us what he's thinking in first person, then switches immediately to third, still using Bell as a focus. Bell philosophizes about how he's never seen criminals quite as bad as these drug pushers. He never really believed in Satan until confronted with these people. McCarthy does like to preach occasionally and Bell is a willing stand-in; he indicts not only the drug pushers, but also the people who buy them, and he also seems to hint at some kind of organized crime syndicate that is intentionally chipping away at the American character, hence the title NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

I have to admit that I was completely caught off guard by what happened to Llewelyn Moss. It happens after a jump cut, and I kept thinking McCarthy was playing some kind of trick on the reader. No such luck. McCarthy is just as ruthless as Chigurh, the hit man. And there's another surprise in story when it comes time to resolve Sheriff Bell's story arc. You won't believe that one either.

Dark and suspenseful. Keeps you guessing what will happen next and before you know it you have read the entire book in one day. No Country for Old Men can be called In with the Young and Out with the Old. I love this book.

My humble advice is to disregard the 1-star reviews, read the book, and come to your own conclusions about this book. It seems that the 1-star reviews are plagued by complaints of "This book doesn't end the way I wanted it to...", "This books does not follow commonly accepted rules of punctuation...", and other banal comments that simply indicate to me that the book is beyond the reading ability of the reviewers. In an age of repetitive novel plots and universal happy endings, it is refreshing to see a truly original plot and a storyline that is at once believable and yet surreal. This is a "big boy & girl book", perhaps the 1-star reviewers should stick to pop-up books, mass market crime trash, and Disney movie biographs.

In No Country for Old Men, evil is an almost conscious, malevolent presence taking advantage of opportunities presented by the unraveling of the traditional American social fabric and the values that knit it together. In this, his latest novel, McCarthy returns to a theme he explored in his ultra-violent masterpiece Blood Meridian-that violence is as much a part of living in our world as turning your face toward the warm sun, culture and its amnesias notwithstanding.

The action takes place in southern Texas, a dry, baked country along the border of Mexico. Llewelyn Moss, working his way across a barren ridge at dawn, hunting antelope, walking in the footsteps of ancient hunters and the "tracks of dragons," soon to become prey himself. Moss comes upon the aftermath of a big drug deal gone bad, a scene complete with bullet-ridden SUVs, high-tech weapons, corpses, a pile of drugs. A mile or so away he finds another corpse and a satchel containing over $2 million and he makes the first of two fateful decisions.

Moss is now linked to Anton Chigurh, a man of great intelligence and powers of observation, and one of the most preternaturally resourceful, and chillingly efficient predators since the death of the last velociraptor. A freelance assassin who uses a pneumatic cattlegun-the kind used in slaughterhouses-to blow the cylinders out of locks or quietly blow a steel bolt into someone's forehead. The police can't get a description of him because there is never anyone left alive to identify him.

Actions have their consequences. And in this novel there is no escaping the consequences. The logic is ironclad. The coin is in the air and it is turning. What determines the outcome? For me, this is the most interesting question that McCarthy asks in this novel. Each moment in a human life is made up of the simultaneous convergence of the myriad moments that preceded it. Decision, choices, and actions leaving a trail of karmic crumbs that can be followed backward or projected forward, by a discerning mind.

But, other forces are at work. In a novel of cold, hard facts, luck, mostly bad, is directly referenced at least fifteen times, and in several additional circumstances and moments, luck plays a role in determining the outcome of events. In two instances, Chigurh flips a coin and asks his potential victim to call it, appearing to allow the person a say in determining whether or not he or she is murdered on the spot. In one case, a random encounter, chance, and by extension, luck, is primary. In the other, he seems to know the outcome in advance and flips the coin in order to give his victim some momentary sense of hope. In both cases the caller is innocent; not a primary target. For persons in the latter category there seems to be no force in heaven or on earth that can prevent Chigurh from making the final calculation and calling in the karmic chits.

Read No Country for Old Men slowly. Especially the dialogue. These are people who live deliberately in the hot, clear desert air, surrounded by tradition, and layers upon layers of culture-past and present, lost and found. Try to read the dialogue at the speed and cadence that you imagine the characters might speak. This is where McCarthy's genius, his mastery of language and dialogue, becomes clearly apparent.

I started No Country yesterday afternoon. After the first couple of chapters I thought I knew where Mac was going. The dialogue is minimal, dry and leathery as the old cowboy you might find in the corner of some jerkwater Texas bar....there's the usual sudden violence snappy and shocking as the bite of rattler and there's a story here as well. It quickly grips you and hangs on like a tick until you're suddenly aware that hours have passed and the day has turned to night. On many levels McCarthy is like Borges. He is a man who searches for the invisible forces that push us down the road of life.... He explores the inevitablity of the past as it collides with the present. When it comes to holding up America and looking at it in all it's ragged and horrible glory few writers today come close to exposing the country for the souless vacum it has become. This is real living American literature and McCarthy is perhaps her finest living writer. He is able to grab hold of the vanishing West ( and all that was good about it.. meaning the country itself..) and share it , even as it disappears , with his readers.
There is much that is true in this book .... much that needs to be digested and thought about....and mixed in the blood and guts of this story more beauty than most "establishment" writers can only dream about putting to paper.

This Cormac McCarthy story was also great (The Road was also a good one)! In this book, he tells the tale of what would happen if you ran into a jackpot! That is what the main character runs into, a jackpot (suitcase full of money), but, is it really worth it is the question Cormac poses to the reader. The story is also sprinkled with great dialogue and interesting characters, like the psychotic killer and the proud sheriff. All in all, it is an awesome story, and I highly recommend it.

I loved the movie so much that I bought the book and was pleasantly surprised with it. The first 100 pages or so are almost exactly the same as the movie, but after that you start getting new narratives from Sheriff Bell and more dialogue from Anton Chigurh. All of the extras were relavent to the story and added plenty of interest.

The best addition was probably the more intricate back and forth between Chigurh and Carson Wells; it took the reader even deeper into Chigurh's reasoning for what he does. Sheriff Bell also reveals more about his time in the war and why he feels like he can't live up to his father's stature.

This is a great book that's written in a unique way--run-on sentences, no quotation marks, streaming thought--but it's not hard to follow. It reads like a breeze; a casual reader can finish this 300-page book in about three weeks.

This is the first Cormac McCarthy novel I have read. I only became aware of him due to the movie. This is an excellent book, mostly due to the incredible development and growth of the Sheriff Bell character. Bell has been a soldier and sheriff all his life, and now he is starting to re-think some important decisions that he made. Like many of us, he does not understand or approve of the changes in our society, especially the culture of drugs, violence, and indifference.

A native West Texas actor Tommy Lee Jones was perfectly cast as the sheriff. It is time to forgive his ridiculous support for Al Gore Jr and concede that he is the perfect man for this role.

The movie focuses on the chase sequence involving Chigur, Wells, and Moss, which is intense and taut. Moss never really understands the danger that he is in, and fails to take bold action when it is presented. Like almost everyone in this thing, Wells ends up dead, almost immediately after he is introduced.

The novel has a lot more insight into Bell's character. We learn that he has been living a lie since the war and has many other demons to contend with.

Why has no one made heavy of the fact that with No Country for Old Men Cormac McCarthy fulfills the american lit void created by the neglect of Jim Thompson. This book, and in retrospect so much of McCarthy, reeks and seeks the power of Thompson at his criminal-meets-moralistic best. We've got sheriff-riffs, heartless/hearty KILLERS, texas fields of blood, wild-willed women and a cattle killing tool.

I'm an old man...McCarthy's an old man...Thompson is a (dead) old man and he was an old man even when he was a young man...this one is for everyone entertaining a killer inside...

I read some of the other reviews and I don't get it. The book is OK, but 5 stars? And when did people stop using quotation marks to enclose quotes when characters are talking. For the first part of the book, I would have to stop and think, "Is this him narrating or is a character talking?". He does have a talent for figuring out how people in character talk, but no more than other authors I have read. I thought the story lagged in someplaces and needed stronger character development for its more interesting characters. For example, the killer, who was the most interesting in the story should have had more on him. What made him tick? Where is he from?

For the most part, I thought this was a typical story that has played out in many other books and movies. A guy stumbles across a drug cartels money and they want it back. This just doesn't have a happy ending.

Maybe I'm just a simpleton that does not understand literature (I mostly read non-fiction), but this book did not really do anything for me other than fill some time.

Anton Chigurh? Is this for real? I searched via infoplace the New York white pages listings for a Chigurh. Not a one. Searched L.A.'s. Not a one. So I searched all 50 States. Not a single Chigurh in the entire nation.

And then there's the puzzlers. Who's the Mexican on death row Bell goes to see at the end? How does Chigurh slip away from Bell in the motel lot where Moss had been zapped? And what's with the WWII episode and then the long visit with uncle Ellis?

I guess I still don't buy that Moss, after stealing 2.3 million dollars from a drug cartel, would hike back to the scene of the crime to give a baddie a drink of water.

I agree with another reviewer who said that the climax happens off-stage and we don't get to see it. This is really too bad because the one confrontation between Moss and Chigurh in the Eagle Hotel was just riveting and brilliantly done although I couldn't figure out why Moss didn't just shoot the guy (other than it'dve ended the book).

Still, a not-unenjoyable read.

While I do agree that the writing is strong I found this book to be borderline fluff. Characters are introduced and eliminated for no apparent reason or explanation (I am still not even sure who the main character is). There is no real plot here nor is there a climax. Everything is just very random. Key parts of the action are completely skipped and then spoken about by the characters later on... similar to a low budget movie that does not want to spend the money on the expensive scenes.

If there is a lot of deeper meaning and symbolism it was lost on me. I feel like you need to truly engross a reader to get that point across. Here I was just thinking "who cares?" the whole time.

I came to this book not knowing anything at all about the story, the writer or the movie for that matter. I hate to say it but I am still somewhat in the dark after tredding my way through 309 pages.

The author's style is not the easiest to get through. He changes from a third person narrative to a first person on a dime. The conversations that take place between characters do not include any inflection, punctuation or quotation marks. This makes it very difficult to follow the storylines as well as who is saying what.

The story is pretty good and that killer is definitely one mean, relentless SOB. The only reason I did nto stop reading was that when the author was writing from the vantage point of the killer it was a MUCH better read and moved much faster.

As for the ending, talk about anti-climactic. No, I will giveaway the ending here but suffice to say I had to go back and read the last several pages 2-3 times to make sure that I actually didn't miss it - it goes by THAT fast and comes in the same manner and broken patter as the rest of the book.

Are all of this guy's books written the same way? If so, I'll pass on them and read those authors who can I feel can write with a more definitive narrative.

I read No Country for Old Men more than a year after seeing the film, and was a little disappointed. It is a strong and thought-provoking story that makes you think hard about our "civilization" and where it is headed. But the impact of the story is weakened by the uneccessary confusion the author creates with his abandonment of quotation marks and his rapid and startling changes of perspective.
The extraordinary acting of Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones made the characters of Chigurh and Bell more affecting on screen than they are in the book. And the dramatic presentation resolved the confusion caused by the author's artistic affectation.
I definitely recommend the book--as always there is important material that can't be presented on film--but I think the movie was far more powerful.

Nobody writes about good and evil like Cormac McCarthy. His prose itself is a study in contrasts, combining a poet's sensibility of language with an economy of storytelling that can only be described as brilliant. The book paints a picture of inexorable human actors, both brutal and virtuous, with a brush that never fails to highlight the detached beauty in all things, whether it is the terrain of west Texas or the pattern of a shotgun blast on a storefront.

In Mississippi, the worst tornadoes are often preceded by a weirdly beautiful green light, set in a dark sky. McCarthy's story put that same mix of horror, beauty, and fatality in the pit of my stomach.

It's not a perfect story, but it's damn close.

About two weeks ago I got ahold of a galley of Cormac McCarthy's soon-to-be-released novel, No Country for Old Men. In the vein of his "Border Trilogy," comprised of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, this story is set along the Texas-Mexico border. In Sanderson, Texas this time. With an announced first printing of 250,000 copies, No Country for Old Men should be a blockbuser like McCarthy's other novels.

The tome begins when Llewelyn Moss, a Sanderson welder, stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad south of town and ends up toting away several million dollars in cash. As you can imagine, his life changes pretty drastically at that moment, as do the lives of his small family and everyone interested in the money, including Terrell County Sheriff Bell. From Sanderson, Moss travels around west and south Texas and Mexico trying to decide what to do to save his life, the money and the lives of those who are unfortunate and get in the way of the psychopathic killers persuing him. Along the way you'll read words familiar to Texans: candelilla, catclaw, Mexican eagles and Rio Grande border cities - Piedras Negras, Eagle Pass, Ciudad Acuna, and Del Rio.

The book is suspenseful and violent, though not graphic, and has generally mild language. Knowing west Texas as I do, I read some incongruous passages such as the dirt being red around Sanderson or antelope grazing south of town (they graze about 100 miles west). But, while taking a novelist's license by painting Terrell County as much more violent and drug-ridden than it is, McCarthy captures the feel of the area and the honesty and good hearts of its people. If you came from or treasure rural Texas - both in my case - you should read No Country for Old Men.

I confess that I do not understand the excitement about this book. It is an acceptable novel, but hardly the acme of literature it is often described as being.
Personally, I find the author’s war on grammar distracting. What, exactly, is wiring with quotation marks? Why are some apostrophes good and others bad? What basis does he use for creating new compound words?

. . . which, unfortunately, works better as a genre piece than as thought-provoking literature. Sure, it is better than the vast bulk of crime novels, but it lacks the mythic and epic qualities found in Blood Meridian.

Most people seeking out McCarthy are not really looking for plot - they are looking for his unique writing. That being said, the plot (taking place in the familiar Tex-Mex borderlands) revolves around a "regular guy" who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad - all that's left are the dead, the drugs and the cash. He makes off with the cash, which sets in motion the various parties to the deal hunting him down. Mayhem ensues, while the Sheriff always follows one step behind the carnage.

The last 30 pages or so seem tacked on - as if McCarthy wasn't so sure his ideas got across (or what they even were) so he added some padding to try and make them more explicit - whereas in Blood Meridian, the philosophical notes were woven throughout the plot.

The characters are also less interesting than their obvious counterparts in Blood Meridian. The gimmick of Chigurgh employing a bolt shooter would seem more at home in a Thomas Harris novel, and Sheriff Bell would be right at home in the movie Fargo. Bell's cracker barrel wit and wisdom is so corny and so contrived that he sounds like he just stepped out of Mayberry. Ditto the characterization of his wife.

Which brings me to the central problem I had with the book: I can't decide if it is so simple-minded as to be insultng or so convoluted as to be worthless. Whether Chirgurgh or Bell (or either) speaks for McCarthy is problematic. As for Chigurgh, he is simply the embodiement of fatalism, and his only totem is violence (as if that were the exclusive means of expressing evil). But Bell, while talking a big talk about how, as Sheriff, it's his job to protect his constituents and be "the first to die," does everthing in his power to avoid confrontation. He even announces this intent in the first two pages. He is ultimately a coward, even though we understand his fear. But his constant griping about how the violence after which he is cleaning up (as opposed to actually preventing) is a consequence of kids no longer saying "yes sir" and "no ma'am" or dyeing their hair green is too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Surely, McCarthy cannot really believe this, because the "good old days" portrayed in Blood Meridian (before kids dyed their hair green) were hardly paradigms of benevolence and morality. But what to make of Bell's concomitant musings on abortion or war? Or his simultaneous attack on corruption of conservative-friendly corporations? (Those who view the book as an attack on liberalism better get out their scorecards.) Is the whole things just a big goof on red state values? Unlikely. More likely is that the book lacks political or philosophical coherence. Maybe the point is that there is no point, but then so what - it says nothing, and is simply an intriguingly plotted crime novel.

Rather than take the easy and expected path, and have Sheriff Bell find the vile villian Chigurh and dispatch him in the way the reader is hoping and thirsts for, he allows the Sheriff, like most of us, to abandon the project and simply live with the idea of the existence of evil in the world and that he simply cannot do anything about it. Evil wins, like it does everyday in the real world, justice does not prevail.

The spare prose of the book is reminscent of Bukowski (indeed, Bukowski could have written this book), or David Schow. It was my first McCarthy, and there will be more!

This is the second book I have read of the author's after his brilliant The Road.

Unfortunately, this is a step down in material. I just didn't get into the book at all.

A man stumbles across a drug deal gone bad, he seizes the chance to take the drug money but this will involve being on the run for life. Tough choice but he took the money.

From there, we get to see the life of the man, Moss, and the people chasing him. The book is reminiscent of James Lee Burke but not nearly at his level.

A weak, confusing and largely pointless story from one of our greatest writers. I just feel so sorry. My condolences, Mr. McCarthy. Your immense talent has mostly deserted you here.

The worst of it, as a friend of mine says, is that you can see the book it might've been. It probably could not have been as richly rewarding as his great novels, "Blood Meridian" and "Suttree," but it could've been a lot better than this. (A similar book that is much more successful is Kem Nunn's "Tijuana Straits.")

Still, "No Country For Old Men" has its moments. Even for all its faults, it's much better than the usual bestseller cheese.

Major disappointment. I'd just finished re-reading the brilliant "Suttree" this summer, and kind of even got into the idea of McCarthy writing a stripped-down pulp novel, like I'd heard "No Country for Old Men" might be. Different can be good. What isn't good, though, is finding a novel like "No Country for Old Men" that continuously reminds you not only of the author's better work elsewhere but also of other novels (and even movies) that handle the same kind of material better. And it's not so good to find a novel that includes dialogue that, while sometimes sharp, also sometimes verges into near self-parody of the author's previous work. And that's particularly frustrating when McCarthy, the author in question, is among the top five living American authors.

A couple of readers have mentioned Jim Thompson as a comparison here, which is a good call. Larry McMurtry is another, as Chigurh has an awful lot in common with some of McMurtry's roaming Western psycopaths as much as he does with Judge Holden from "Blood Meridian." But, let's be blunt, good as McMurtry and Thompson can be, Cormac McCarthy, when he's on his game, blows 'em both out of the water, going weirder, darker, deeper, with sentences and images that can burn the skin off a rattlenake. So why, after reading "No Country for Old Men," am I not saying what I expected to-- "Wow, look where McCarthy has taken the pulp novel"-- and, am instead just left feeling like "huh, is that all there is?"

A lot of critics have compared McCarthy to Faulkner, and if that comparison holds any water, then we may be witnessing the equivalent here of Faulkner's later-career hack-for-cash work on Hollywood scripts. Like Faulkner's film scripts, there are some interesting moments in "No Country for Old Men", but it's shallow waters compared to the writer's earlier work. The book feels very Hollywood; the first 200 pages reads like a fairly tight film script for a passable thriller of the caliber of, say, "A Simple Plan" (man finds a bag of money at a crash scene, violence ensues). Characters also drift in the novel from the usual vivid and funny McCarthy dialogue into unrealistic B-movie speechifying, particularly the villain, who occasionally begins to sound like the Joker in Batman pontificating "now, before I kill you, let me explain in great detail my worldly philosophy" (And McCarthy's villain pretty much entirely steals the coin-flipping gimmick of that other Batman baddie, Two-Face!).

But those readers new to McCarthy who've been told the novel is more "accessible," particularly those who get sucked into the thriller style of the first pages, should be warned that at least one major climax in the novel's plot takes place inexcusably and unsatisfyingly "off-camera." Likewise, if you're a hardcore McCarthy fan, you might well be disappointed with "No Country for Old Men" as it often lacks the substance and imagery of his ealier works. If you're somewhere in between these categories, this book might be for you.

I have spent a lot of time in the far West Texas and border country McCarthy is writing about. An author has the right to select his materials and I would not deny that the violence he depicts is there. However, I have known people who have lived and hunted in these remote areas all their lives and never had trouble. People out there have stopped to help me change a tire that was flat, and pulled me out of a large puddle I was stupid enough to try to drive through and had to spend the entire night in. Beekeepers close to the Rio Grande, down from Van Horn, did that. He is following just a few threads of a complex tapestry. I would also add that the Texas Rangers in the early 2Oth century killed a lot of Mexican-Americans along that border, and that border wars were fought by some Mexicans trying to retake the territory we'd taken from Mexico by invasion, but that kind of violence went on long before the book opens. There are also a lot of strong women in this area, like Hallie Stillwell. McCarthy's women just do what the men say. No one, by the way, has explained why Chigurh turns all the money over to the big guy behind the whole drug deal, or why he doesn't shoot the big guy. Apparently killing means more to him than money, and he doesn't want people coming after him. He wants to be hired on to kill other people who try to steal the drugs for the top brass.

A writer of Mr McCarthy's ability and importance cannot and should not be dismissed with a simple analysis and the same is true of any work that he creates. Much of the criticism of this work in these pages is misconceived, prejudicial and to a large extent lazy.

To deal initially with a simple example - a comment that Mr McCarthy is a regional writer in both his settings and his concerns and ultimately in his readership. Well to the reviewer that stated that McCarthy would only interest readers from the American Southern States I will first point out that this review is coming from Dublin, Ireland a place as far removed in the English speaking world from those southern states as is imaginable. The criticisms he makes of McCarthy's concerns and regionalism are equally applicable most of great literature - from Homer's Odyssey to Joyce's Ulysses.

It might surprise that reviewer that the very first thing one notes about Mr McCarthy's new work, the title itself, is far from regional. It is a quote from W.B. Yeats in the poem "Sailing to Byzantium":

"That is no country for old men,

The young in one anothers arms,

Those dying generations at their song".

I think it is from this reference that we must first take our lead in reading this novel.

Yeats is writing of his tiredness of the physical world, his exhaustion, his desire to be released from a world of the senses and a retreat into a world of the glittering intellect.

McCarthy's ruminations take us in another direction. My reading of the book is that he is speaking of the tiredness of an old man and his desire to retreat from a world he no longer understands. In the end the conclusion reached by Mr McCarthy is almost the opposite to that sought by Yeats. He is suggesting that rather than retreat to the intellect the retreat should be to the heart. Yeats speaks of leaving his home for a mystical intellectual world, McCarthy speaks of leaving a world in chaos to return home.

This novel is spare and fast moving and appears to have many unfinished plotlines (a bit like real life in that regard) but I think that it is a mistake to assume that this is accidental or the result of rushed work. Having read it I reread it and could not identify a weak or ill considered passage. It is an immensely personal work in that I believe there is more of McCarthy in Bell than in any other character in his work with the possible exception of "Suttree" (unfortunately I have never met the man but I can only hope that I am right).

This is a work that I can recommend like no other book i have read this year. It is not regional, it is not political, it is not rushed. It merits every moment you give to it and will pay you back a hundred times it you open your mind to it.

I saw the movie, and rather than ruin the book - which CAN happen - that merely made me question the Coen brother's decisions a few times since the dialouge is exactly the same. But the sheriff's thoughts are filled and more developed in print.

This is the first novel by McCarthy that I've read, bypassing his other works because they were too bloody-minded. This novel also has its cold-blooded violence, yet the masterful writing style and powerful descriptive passages made it too compelling to pass up once I had opened it at the bookstore. Jeffrey Lent of "Washington Post Book World" calls it, "The most accessible of all [McCarthy's] works." It is that, yet after accessing the story and being exposed to its violence, the death of a main character, and the reflections of Sheriff Bell (which serve as a narrative thread), I was left wondering what the point of the novel was. There is nihilism here. Sheriff Bell and his wife survive but not unscathed. McCarthy depicts the values and mores that most people, or at least most of the characters, as operating by as feeble and, perhaps, anachronistic. I enjoyed the novel, but there is no joy in it.

It's fascinating to read the one-star reviews for this title. For the most part, the criticisms are valid, and I can understand the objections. Is it nihilism or is it satire? Are the sheriff's monologues a vehicle for the author's conservative political views or just a collection of annoying platitudes? And exactly why has McCarthy forsaken traditional punctuation? I don't know. But I do know that every bit of it worked for me. Each character rang true and propelled an excellent story artfully told.

Aw hell he said. Hed almost put the apostrophe in dont. He stood up, walked to the kitchen, got a clean glass out of the cupboard, filled it with water from the tap, drank half of it, and carried the rest back into the den and set the glass down on a clear space on his desk.

This is an example of all too much of the writing in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. McCarthy occasionally shows fits of good writing. He has some good characters and he handles suspense well. That's why the book was given two stars. Since there's no "no stars" category, a book with any virtues at all should have at least two stars.

That being said, I find this book annoying and largely pointless. Besides having the nagging feeling that McCarthy is an "artiste", whose affected style is as annoying as fingernails on a blackboard, the theme seems to be "everything is crap and there's nothing you can do about it." The only thing the book inspires is paranoia (which is a survival trait in some circumstances) and the urge to sit in a tub of warm water and open one's wrists.

Yes, the drug trade is becoming a greater danger every day. Yes, people who run the gangs and their "soldiers" are a collection of soulless monsters. And, yes, bad things happen to basically decent people. None of this is news.

A friend of mine thought the invulnerable hit man was Death. I really couldn't say, nor does it matter. If so, it's just another idea that's been done before and better. (If you want a really great portrayal of death in a far better book, I recommend Jonathon Carroll's FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS) More to the point, the hit man is simply the unstoppable menace, just like the cyborg in "Terminator" or the shark in JAWS.

After finishing the book, I found myself wondering whether I should send a quarter to Mr McCarthy and one to his publisher to help them buy a few apostrophes and quotation marks. That's not the message of a good book.

Cormac McCarthy weaves another "can't put it down" story with well drawn characters and a heart pounding plot. His people get themselves into situations by their own choices, decisions they cannot change.

The book, for the most part, reads fast and is generally entertaining, but it should have been put through a good editor's wringer. All Bell's hokey knee-slapping monologues and the endless pages of pointless meandering driveling dialogue should have been cut, cut, cut. That would have reduced it by a third, to the size the meagre plot could sustain. The actual central plot problem of take the money and run is a good one, but McCarthy weighs it down to the point it's a getaway car with four flat tires. Also, the story and Moss's credibility both take a plunge when he has you know who is his sight at the hotel and does nothing. (He may as well have said: "Okay, Sugar, turn around and put your hands over your eyes and count to a hundred. No peeking.") Big mistake. Also, for all Chigurh's bloodletting, I found him surprisingly non-menacing. Maybe it was the tension-releasing conversations he had with his victims before shooting them. And there were numerous small but wearing mistakes. I know Texas is considered a tad delinquent, but can you really buy a vehicle from a dealership and go to a notary without identification?

Still, this is Cormac McCarthy, and even at his worst, he's worth the effort ("Reach me that machinegun from under the seat." Hilarious). I just think he could have had a beautiful little black diamond here for his collection, and he seems to have rushed it, taken shortcuts, and did not engage a merciless second pair of eyes to help him polish it out. And that's a shame.

Let me say this up front: I feel McCarthy is the most important living American writer. BLOOD MERIDIAN and THE BORDER TRILOGY are up there with the best of Faulkner. I am not somebody who is disappointed at the lack of convention in a novel, or who feels cheated if his expectations are foiled. I am a patient reader who loves to go digging and is more than happy to reread a paragraph simply to bask in its lyrical beauty.

Having said all that, McCarthy is no deity despite his prodigious talent and vision. The plot here is pure Michael Mann, forgivable except that it is an excuse for the grousings of someone who believes the world is going to hell in a handbasket. McCarthy's Sheriff Bell shows up in first person throughout the novel to tell us what our moral compass ought to be, and points out how much better people's values were when he was younger. We are supposed to see this as indicators of a downfall, but it's as if McCarthy has forgotten the lessons of his own BLOOD MERIDIAN, where it is undeniable that the world of Bell's youth is far better than the world of that novel. Where's the longer perspective?

A reread did not convince me that there were deep layers of meaning I had missed. Yes, the Vietnam war haunts this book the way it ghosted BLOOD MERIDIAN. But people reading "Carl Jung" into "Carla Jean" are having a field day with an ink blot. McCarthy handles first-person narrative here with a tyro's clumsiness, heavy handed and transparent. It's almost shocking to encounter after experiencing page after page of his sure, deft control, eidetic imagery, and pure narrative of nearly hallucinatory poetry. A reread *did* make me wonder why the novel seems so claustrophic -- most of it takes place in roadside motels so interchangeable that at times McCarthy relies on the reader's confusion as to which we are at.

That said, McCarthy at his worst is still better than 95% of what is out there, and I am going to sit down with my copy of THE ROAD the day it comes out.

Anarchy. Drugs. Gang violence. Desperation. No Country For Old Men resonates with today's times and for those, like Sheriff Bell, that can't wrap their mind around the meaningless chaos in today's papers. This book is loaded with wisdom and introspection beyond a solid suspense novel and deserves all the accolades it has recieved.

This is also a rare instance where the movie is as good as the book. The Coen Brothers captured McCarthy's nihilistic world.

Most of the reviews on this book contain a synopsis so I will spare you on this. I want to discuss the meat of why I read Cormac's books.

If you have read several novels from Cormac McCarthy then you know the theme he goes to time and again. Ambiguous characters that represent the good and evil in all of us. Shades of gray. No character is pure evil and no character is perfectly good. A common literary device but done with masterful use of vocabulary (bring your thesaurus). Even the antagonist in this story, Anton Chigurh, has his own moral code, twisted as it may be.

And such is the theme of No Country for Old Men. What I really like about Cormac's books is that there is no inner monologue. There is no "she thought" or "he thought". There are no italicized words indicating what a character is thinking. Cormac develops his characters through dialogue and action. This sometimes contributes to the starkness of his novels.

Cormac's books can be difficult reads, even for the accomplished reader. His sentences can be long and his pronoun usage odd and the nouns obscure. But not in No Country for Old Men. Not in any of his recent novels, really. Maybe he is trying to make his books more accessible. Maybe it's the agent or publisher. Who knows and who cares.

So if you have been put off in the past because of the difficulty in reading his books, fear not. This novel is at an eighth grade level compared to "Sutree" or "Blood Meridian."

Ultimately I ended up empathizing more with Chigurh than any of the other characters. He is a pure creature, a man who kills not out of money or hate but because killing is his function in this world. He is a man of his word, unflinching in the face of death and has ice-water flowing in his veins. As mentioned in the book, Chigurh would have made a sublime soldier.

I think there is a sort of inversion of values in the book. "(Chigurh) placed his hand on the man's head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing." It became quite obvious to me that Chigurh is a symbol of God (in fact he distinctly states that he models himself after God). He is ubiquitous, unknowable, "a new breed of man." He moves with inhuman deliverance and has a profound understanding of his place in the world.

In contrast, Bell is an apostate or sorts, a man that he's abandoned hope in his profession and in the world. He is a spineless, antiquated man, out of touch with the world, an escapist who dwells in the past. To him the world is no longer worth fighting for, no longer wants to put his "soul at hazard." Against Chigurh he is always on his back foot, unsure and overwhelmed, merely defending what's left instead of attacking.I felt that Bell's monologues got progressively more frayed, defeated and narrow. I was never sure if Bell was a mouthpiece for MacCarthy's personal convictions, or if he was more of a caricature of aging conservatives.

Moss is MacCarthy's depiction of modern man: greedy, self-destructive, unsavable. He is fully aware of his folly, yet he doesn't have the fortitude to turn away from that which he knows will destroy him. It is early in the book he says to himself, "There is no definition of a fool...that you fail to satisfy. Now you're goin to die."

It strikes me as funny when people say this is MacCarthy's most accessible book, because this novel is basically a denunciation of modern American society and it's future. According to him, man's fate is sealed and salvation can only come through death. I think MacCarthy is one of the finest American writers currently alive, but I cannot help but question the moral message of this book.

There is so much to praise for "No Countyry for Old Men". The discriptions of the landscape was amazing as always with MaCarthy's novels. The Characters were excellent. Their depth and style were fun to follow. Especially since much of their personalities were easily defined by the flow of their dialog. His writing style is fantastic and it allows you to keep interested without skipping predicable or useless parts. Although I hate to display my ignorance, but I could not follow the last few pages. I will not give anything away, I would just like to know how they were nessesary.

Usually the book is always better than the movie, however, since the movie was brilliantly crafted by the Coen Brothers it would have to be a sensational novel to come in first place, which it does, because of McCarthy's exceptional storytelling and prose. Using the multi devices of first person and third, we experience a magnitude of insight to the human condition with this twisting tale of regret and tragedy. The dialogue of Cormac McCarthy is superb with every character's attitude, flaws and state of heart feeling unique and real. I did the forbidden and read the book after seeing the film; however, I enjoyed it even more and have reread No Country For Old Men numerous times since.

I liked Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, but this one was a huge disappointment. Chigurh, the villain here, is a pale imitation of the Judge from Blood Meridian; where the Judge's musings always seemed to fit the story, Chigurh's ramblings are pointless and interrupt the flow. Look at his dialogue about the coin flip - at first, you suspect there's something deep about predestination/free will, but re-read the passage and it's really a freshman philosophy sketch. A character named Wilson shows up in the middle of the book and soon is gone, for no reason - he adds nothing to the story. The foreshadowed confrontation between Bell and Chigurh never occurs; it seemed that the last 20 pages of the book were missing. There are some vague ideas about everything going to hell because of hippies and anti-war protestors from the sixties ... good grief, I thought Ann Coultier was the only one who believed that nonsense! Again, I have liked this author very much, but this book reminded me of Thomas Harris's Hannibal, both a refusal to give readers the book they wanted.

This is one of my favorite books of all time! A man makes a discovery/decision, and the way his life, and the lives around his dramatically change. The movie is also well done and very true to the book. Read the book first. It is well written, tight, to the point, moves fast. Great book!

The book world is brimming with super-embellished descriptions and writers who spoonfeed their audience every meaningless detail. For me, it's a pleasure to always come back to McCarthy who has honed his craft to the bare, polished bone. I appreciate the challenge McCarthy presents to the reader in imagining for ourselves these characters and their timeless setting. And he is always honest. This book is no exception.

No Country for Old Men is both a crime novel and not a crime novel. Told at a break-neck pace, it is the tale of a harrowing crime spree, the Mexican drug trade, and a search for inner-peace. McCarthy adds to the pace of the novel with his use of sparsely descriptive prose and punctuation. As a reader, I felt as if I were running head first and blindfolded to an uncertain demise. Then, McCarthy pulled the rug out form underneath me with a deeply introspective ending rife with social commentary. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys action, mystery, and books that leave you considering the world in which we live.