No Country for Old Men

Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, finds several dead men, a truck full of heroin and a case containing two million dollars. He takes the money.

Anton Chigurh is sent to recover it. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, approaching retirement, follows the wreckage and understands from early on that he is not going to be able to stop any of it.

He takes the money knowing exactly what it will cost, and takes it anyway.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The novel alternates between Moss's flight, Chigurh's pursuit, and Bell's first-person reflections, which open each chapter in italics.

Bell's sections are commentary rather than narrative, and they carry the book's argument while the other two carry its plot. McCarthy also never lets the three perspectives overlap directly, so the reader assembles the chronology from three separate and partial accounts.

He operates by a stated code involving coin tosses and promises kept, and the novel refuses to explain him or to give him a history.

He functions as a principle rather than as a character, and the flatness with which he is presented — no interiority, no motive beyond consistency — is what makes him effective.

Moss is genuinely capable: a veteran, a good shot, careful, and thinking clearly about transponders, motel layouts and border crossings.

The novel's tension comes from watching a competent man do everything right against something that competence does not affect, which is an unusual and bleak construction.

The sheriff's monologues propose that something has changed, that the violence is of a new kind, and that he is unequipped for it.

The novel is ambivalent about whether he is right. Several of his own anecdotes undercut the claim, and McCarthy appears to intend the nostalgia to be questionable.

Spare, unpunctuated dialogue without quotation marks, minimal description, and short declarative sentences.

It is the plainest of McCarthy's novels and the closest to genre, and the style's austerity suits a book about people who do not explain themselves. McCarthy also drops almost all punctuation in dialogue, which forces the reader to attribute speech by rhythm and is remarkably unproblematic in practice.

It is frequent, sudden and described without emphasis, and several major events occur off the page entirely.

The most significant death in the book is not shown, which is the novel's boldest decision and the one most readers remember as a shock. McCarthy also refuses to dramatise any of it, reporting outcomes flatly and moving on, which is consistent with the novel's whole position.

It functions completely as a thriller — a chase, a pursuer, a deadline — and is also a novel about the end of a certain understanding of the world.

McCarthy wrote it originally as a screenplay, and the structure retains that economy, which is why it reads faster than his other work.

The specific geography of West Texas and the Rio Grande crossings is used practically, and the drug economy is treated as a permanent feature of the landscape rather than as an event.

The setting is doing thematic work: a place where two jurisdictions meet and neither fully applies.

It refuses every convention: the confrontation the structure promises does not occur, and the novel ends on Bell recounting two dreams about his father.

The refusal is deliberate and the dreams are the book's actual conclusion, which readers find either profound or evasive. McCarthy has also said very little about it, and the dreams have generated a substantial amount of critical argument that the text does not settle.

The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation is extremely faithful, including the withheld death and the dream ending.

It is one of the closest adaptations of a literary novel made, and the two are more or less interchangeable in plot, which is unusual. The Coens also preserved the dialogue almost verbatim in several scenes, which is possible precisely because McCarthy wrote it as a screenplay first.

Readers who want a thriller written at the highest level of prose, and who can accept an ending that declines to deliver what the structure has promised.

It is the most literary book in this section and among the most readable. It requires no familiarity with McCarthy's other work, which is considerably more demanding.