Book Review: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

Marking this one down as one of the books that has surprised me the most this year! I expected an action-packed chase with lots of violence, but what I got was so much more.

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

One day Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain of catastrophic violence that not even the law can contain.

I wholeheartedly loved this book. Sure, it’s bleak and hopeless, but it leaves you with a lot to think about. You think this is a typical thriller about a badass pursuing a regular guy who should have left well enough alone, but it ultimately evolves into a brooding analysis of fate vs free will, and also good vs evil. These are themes I love to read about, hence why East of Eden is one of my favourite books, and McCarthy really elevates it to another level.

The chapters alternate between the main story and the meandering thoughts of Sheriff Bell, and it was Bell’s monologues that really stood out. Every quote worth noting came from those sections, they were just so full of wisdom. His love and tenderness for his wife felt like a nice counterbalance to all the evil and violence unfolding around him.

No Country also gives us one of the most formidable and shit-your-pants-scary villains in literature. Anton Chigurh is the embodiment of pure evil, the grim reaper. Occasionally he will flip a coin and ask a person to call it - by Chigurh’s standards if there is any hesitation in facing their own choices in life, they might as well be dead.

As always, there is the traditional McCarthy style - no quotation marks - but I always surprise myself at how quickly I fall into the rhythm of his writing, and it ceases to be an issue within a few pages. The only minor reason I didn’t give it the full 5 stars was that some major events took place “off-page”, which somewhat confused me, and I still feel a little cheated by.

Overall, incredibly suspenseful. I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Highly recommend! 4.5 stars.

Johann

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