Book Review: No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
A good friend of mine, Dave, sent me the book No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (Dave also sent me McCarthy's The Road). I started reading the book yesterday while camping and finished it off today. In The Road, McCarthy writes of a depraved human condition that follows some cataclysmic event. In No Country For Old Men, one could say that McCarthy describes what he sees as the depravity of our current time. So in a sense, The Road follows up on themes that he establishes in No Country For Old Men. (Note: McCarthy wrote The Road immediately after No Country For Old Men.)

The story follows the events that unfold in several adjacent counties along the Texas-Mexico border. While hunting for antelope in the Texas scrub, Llelywen Moss (a welder by trade and Vietnam veteran) discovers the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong which includes about 5 dead persons, one wounded survivor (a Mexican man who begs for water), a truck bed full of drugs, and bag full of money. He takes the money and returns to his trailer park home and to his wife. But after some restless sleep, he awakens and up a gallon jug with water and returns to the grisly scene to provide aid for the wounded survivor. After leaving his truck nearby, he walks the gallon of water down to the survivor's location only to discover that the wounded man is now dead, having recently been shot by other parties that have recently arrived on the scene. Moss' mission of mercy has now landed him in extreme peril as he must flee the scene on foot and escape by jumping in a nearby river. As a result he has to abandon his truck which, which he correctly surmises, can be used to identify him and where he lives the following morning when the nearby DMV opens.

Moss returns home, instructs his wife to travel by bus to her mother's house in a nearby town, and then sets out on the lamb evading the parties from both sides of the drug deal that are looking to recover the substantial sum of drug money. One of his pursuers, Anton Chigurh, is a merciless killer that has no enemies because "anyone that has had a cross word with him are dead." Chigurh leaves a trail of dead persons during his pursuit of Moss, including another hit man hired to hunt and kill Chigurh.

Meanwhile, the local sheriff's office has discovered the dead drug dealers in the desert and are now trying to find Moss (and his wife) as well. The "old man" in this story is the local county sheriff, Sheriff Bell, who has been sheriff in the county for 40+ years - a command where he has "never had an unsolved homicide, but now has 9 of them inside of a week". Bell's philosophical thoughts are interspersed in chapters through the book (highlighted in italics) as he tries to come to an understanding of what motivates the evil actions he witnesses. He laments the state of his county (and the state of the country in general) where kids buy narcotics and walk with "green hair and nose rings" on the sidewalks of the small towns in his county. In the end, Sheriff Bell decides to retire under an overwhelming burden of failure to protect his county's residents as well as live up to the duty of the office that he feels his father did so well before him. There is no happy ending for the characters in the story, and much of what transpires leaves Sheriff Bell with a strong sense that the world is governed by some sort of divine indifference. But in the end, a sense of divine retribution prevails.

Summary: A good read. Recommended.