A Prophet of Gore
STRONG, BENJAMIN
A Prophet of Gore No Country for Old Men ByCormac McCarthy Knopf. 309 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Benjamin Strong Contributor, the "Village Voice,' the "Believer" CORMAC McCarthy's ninth...
...Refusal—whether of modernity or its spiritual void—makes no difference in McCarthy's universe...
...When Bell realizes what implement accounts for the bulletless wounds in Chigurh's victims, he asks his nonplussed deputy, Torbert, ifhe has ever visited a slaughterhouse...
...But here, after we learn that both Chigurh and Moss are veterans of Vietnam, and that Bell was decorated in World War II, McCarthy uncharacteristically permits us to overhear Bell share a memory of wartime cowardice with his uncle...
...An example is his pitiless description in Suttree (1979) of a cadaver lifted from the Tennessee River: "He was very stiff and he looked like a window-dummy save for his face...
...Those books were a nostalgic horseback ride into the gloaming of traditional cowboy life...
...They use a airpowered gun that shoots a steel bolt out of it...
...In No Country for Old Men, practically a coda, characters travel almost entirely by car, bus and truck on the paved roads that connect the underground economies of the United States and Mexico...
...Chigurh himself recalls Judge Holden, the hairless albino monster in McCarthy's apocalyptic masterpiece, 5/oorfAieridian (1985...
...A more generous if also more vacuous devil, Chigurh allows one of his victims a coin toss to save her own life...
...McCarthy is the least psychological of writers...
...But when she loses and continues to beg for mercy, he proffers a fatalistic amorality of his own: "I have only one way to live...
...It doesnt allow for special cases...
...McCarthy's characters often make this mistake—most pointedly John Grady Cole, the teenage naïf in All the Pretty Horses who flees to Mexico when the family ranch is sold in 1949...
...In search of a Wild West idyll, he finds Mexico's heart of darkness, a country of lawlessness...
...They dont do it thataway no more...
...They raised him so, gambreled up by the bones of his cheek...
...The killer's favored weapon is a hydraulic cattlegun, lethal but also handy for busting door locks...
...The best-selling series—All the Pretti' Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998)—transformed an obscurity who had never before sold more than 3,000 copies of a single title into a celebrated lion...
...He respects nothing that contradicts the natural order of power...
...A coin toss perhaps...
...The brief appearance of the handheld device is likely to startle longtime fans of McCarthy's willfully arcane historical milieus...
...Torbert replies, "They had a knocker straddled the chute and they'd let the beeves through one at a time and he'd knock em in the head with a maul...
...By that macabre standard, No Country for Old Men is McCarthy's most accessible novel yet...
...In this case to small purpose...
...Similarly, No Country for Old Men shifts between the chase for Moss and the money, told in third person, and the first-person ruminations of local Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who hopes to bring Moss home before the villains find him...
...A bully with a Nietzschean outlook, the Judge is a member of a paramilitary gang contracted by the Texas and Mexican governments in the mid19th century to collect Native American scalps...
...A pale incruent wound...
...Moss uncovers a truck bed loaded with heroin and finds a heavy leather valise containing $2 million...
...Nearly every word can be read without a working knowledge of Spanish or an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary...
...Historical law subverts it at every turn...
...In that book, an unidentified narrator intercuts the murder spree of necrophiliac Lester Ballard with foreshadowing backstories and updates on the law's efforts to nab him...
...America, McCarthy again discomfortingly suggests, will surely perish by the sword it was born and has lived by...
...If this sounds hardboiled, it is...
...Fastpaced, even suspenseful, No Country for Old Men is indeed a page-turner...
...Its only analogue in McCarthy's famously impenetrable oeuvre is his third novel, Child of God (1974...
...A past master of Melville's adventurism, the Southern Gothic style and Faulkner's languorous florid effects, McCarthy has also drawn from the tics of Dostoevsky and Joyce (and consequently Homer and Dante) for his uniquely demanding prose style...
...Iknowed what you'd say fore you said it.'" Torbert and Bell are attached to an older world they misguidedly believe was purer, gentler...
...But the elementary McCarthy equation has not changed: The new novel takes its title from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," in which an old man "sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal" acknowledges his own doom...
...They put that thing between the beef's eyes and pull the trigger and down she goes...
...More foolishly, and for no logical reason, he returns to the scene of the crime that night, where he encounters the first of many people after what he has stolen...
...Amid three vehicles, several bodies and a dying Mexican pleading for water...
...Reviewed by Benjamin Strong Contributor, the "Village Voice,' the "Believer" CORMAC McCarthy's ninth novel takes place in 1980, a year recent enough to accommodate the odd mobile phone...
...It's that quick...
...But the prop clearly establishes the parameters of his latest work as those of our own epoch...
...This knowledge renders Bell more pitiable to the reader than Moss or Chigurh, but only because the shame that weighs on him is so useless...
...During a recent interview—only the second the 72-year-old recluse has ever granted—McCarthy revealed that he is currently working on several novels in various states of completion...
...The tragedy of American life in No Country for Old Men—set, as Virginia Woolf might say, between the acts—is not that we fail in our attempts at compassion, but that we are in denial of our atavistic savagery...
...You can see what a problem that must be for them...
...It is significant then that he selected this one as the follow-up to his renowned Border trilogy...
...He done that all day...
...He seemed to protest woodenly, his head awry...
...A welder by trade, Llewelyn Moss spots a distant accident on the highway while hunting antelope in the desert and warily approaches...
...Just shoots it out about so far...
...CHIEF among Moss' pursuers is criminal-for-hire Anton Chigurh, who in the opening scene strangles one of Bell's deputies while still handcuffed...
...How to prevail overthat which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of...
...Most people dont believe that there can be such a person...
...Foolishly, he takes the money...
...War is god," as the Judge says, because death is the only thing that binds one living creature to another in a godless world...
...Torbert wishes Bell hadn't told him: "'Iknow,' saidBell...
...Bell explains, "That sounds about right...
...The face seemed soft and bloated and wore a grappling hook in the side of it and a crazed grin...
...Moral law," he warns, "is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
