No Country for Old Men (2005) by Cormac McCarthy stars off in medias res.
When Llwewllyn Moss is out hunting antelope near the Rio Grande he stumbles into the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. There is one man still barely alive who asks Moss for water. Moss does not have any. He searches the vehicles at the scene and finds heroin in one of them and a whole armoury’s worth of weapons. Off on a hill a little way away there is one more man, dead now, sitting there with a case full of money. Moss takes the money and goes back to his wife Carla Jean. During the night he suddenly gets an attack of conscience and thinks of the dying man’s request for water. He goes back to the site of the drug deal. That’s where things start going pear-shaped.
There are three main players in this novel. Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, also a veteran, but from a different war (World War II) and Anton Chigurh, a hitman.
Each of these men represent a different philosophical standpoint and a different set of values. Moss is a practical tactician, a man who has served in Vietnam as a sniper and he is opportunistic enough to take the drug money when he finds it, knowing all the while that it might end up being a very bad decision. Ed Tom, the Sheriff, has the perspective of a man that lived through the second world war and did reprehensible things during combat that still haunt him. He has seen the direction of the development of society and he finds it increasingly difficult to reconcile what he remembers from his youth with the reality he finds himself living in. His saving grace seems to be the undying love between him and his wife, that is where he finds his redemption and balm. Chigurh is a consummate sociopath, which means he has a deeply philosophical streak that does not stop him in the least from deciding a man’s fate (or a woman’s, for that matter) with a coin toss. There is no sense that he has a conscience in a conventional sense, but he has a code of conduct in a manner of speaking. Once he has accepted an assignment, there is nothing he won’t do to finish the job.
There are also levels of language in this triptych that reflect and enhance what goes on in the chain of events. The passages concerning Moss and Chigurh are mostly coolly descriptive and given in the third person. Dialogue is spare and very focused. McCarthy has an ear for the dialect of the Texas-region and shows a blatant disregard for punctuation and typical dialogue format that gives a heightened feeling of immediacy. The way the action is described makes this bare bones approach unrelenting and somehow makes the bloody violence of it worse.
I’ll give an example. This is the description of Moss trying to outrun pursuers in the desert.
“It was a long trek and he was still some two hundred yards from the river when he heard the truck. A raw gray light was breaking over the hills. When he looked back he could see the dust against the new skyline. Still the better part of a mile away. In the dawn quiet the sound of it no more sinister than a boat on a lake. Then he heard it downshift. He pulled the .45 from his belt so that he wouldn’t lose it and set out at a dead run. When he looked back again it had closed a good part of the distance.” (McCarthy, p. 31).
Chigurh brings all those horror movie Terminator machine killers to mind in his focus. He just keeps coming, no matter how his victims plead or fight back.
Sheriff Bell is given a reflective, almost poetic first person voice that talks calmly to the reader about his experiences and impressions.
This is what Bell’s voice sounds like;
“My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how an tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not having to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Dont haul stuff around with you. I guess that all sounds pretty simple today. Even to me. All the more reason to think about it. He didn’t say a lot so I tend to remember what he did say.” (McCarthy, p. 249).
These literary techniques are dovetailed into each other seamlessly and with spare grace.
I reflected on quality of relentlessness in McCarthy’s novels The Road and Blood Meridian as well, the way lean, descriptive prose creates a forward momentum within the text itself as well as for me as a reader. It is probably a matter of me being unusually susceptible to this particular style, but for some reason the very sparseness makes the violence more gruesome for me personally, letting me use my imagination to fill in all that has not been said. I can look at what McCarthy does and take a step back and wonder how it is even possible that the effect can be as devastating as it is. It is a clear case of less being more.
The title for this novel is borrowed from William Butler Yeats poem ”Sailing to Byzanthium”, and there is some kind of weird gegenshein effect between the poem in lines like old men being like “a tattered coat upon a stick” in relation to the description of the old man Sheriff Bell visits and tells of his exploits in WWII.
Lean and terse though the prose might be, that does not mean it is in any way simple, or simplistic. There is no real nostalgia, no moral high ground, no easy solutions. I like the fact that something this terse can pack such a considerable punch and it really does something spectacular for those of us who can stand it.
Mule
Michael Herr “Dispatches” – The Vietnam War
October 19, 2009
Michael Herr’s Dispatches was first published in 1977 and is a non-fictional book.
There are all kinds of first hand accounts of war. I’ve read quite a few, probably more than I should have at an age when most people were still trying to work through the dolled up teenage literature so heavily prevalent. I went straight to Eric Maria Remarque, Sven Hassel and suchlike.
The Vietnam war has seeped down deep into the mythology of America that it is subjected to a little cross cultural bleeding. But the thing is, there haven’t been many books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches to say anything about the experience itself.
I do the movie thing too, so it’s easier for me to find references in that arena. But there’s a lot of tricky territory to navigate and it’s easy for it to disintegrate into a moral tale like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, or a convenient backdrop the way it’s used in a great many bland American action movies.
There is a brilliant jewel of a parallel here in a totally different style, though, and that’s Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrow of War (1994). But that’s a story for a different time.
Herr’s perspective is that of the perpetual outsider, because he is a journalist. That being said he is in it with the soldiers because he is a battle field journalist. He’s there in the mud and jungle and in the strange highlands alongside the soldiers seeing what they see, but one step removed from them, because he isn’t actually fighting. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t get shot at, though.
But he is trained at observing and that makes this book more immediate. He has an uncanny ability to keep the bigger picture in mind, what’s being said by the generals and press officers as well as what’s going on in the field. He offers a million observations of minutiae like the gunner in a helicopter that asks him to cover up the corpses they’re riding with when the tarp comes loose, or random comments and little throw-away things, like the patter of the soldiers trying to distance themselves or the things they’ve written on their helmets and flak jackets. “A sucking chest wound is natures way of telling you you’ve been in a fire fight”, that kind of thing.
It takes a while to figure it out, because the tone is seductive, but this is actually literature. It might as well be fictional, it is written with that kind of sensibility. It doesn’t pretend to be a truthful account of what happened while Herr was “in country”. It records the experience and gives the reader a good sense of what it was like, of how these event actually felt for someone who was there.
The movie reference isn’t idle on my part, Herr does that himself too, saying those that were there knew what movie they were in. It’s this kind of awareness of cultural pattern that’s laid down over all of it as a template that makes this book so much a warrior poet retelling on par with Sassoon or Remarque. It doesn’t matter if Herr is describing the way Saigon feels or the jungle or the highlands, or his fellow journalists or the grunts.
The telescoping eye of the author gives you glimpses and catches and explanations as well as just remembrances that enhance and enrich the descriptions. There’s very little glory in it all, but there is a kind of beauty none the less, and that makes it all the more compelling and horrific. Which is just the way you want this kind of narrative to be really, at least to my mind.
Mule
