No Country for Old Men

Author	Cormac McCarthy
Language	English
Genre	Thriller, Novel
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	July 19 2005
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	320 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-375-40677-8 (hardback edition) Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. Set along the United States–Mexico border in 1980, the story concerns an illicit drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert location. The title comes from the poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.

Plot

The plot follows the interweaving paths of the three central characters (Moss, Chigurh, and Bell) set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the Mexican-American border in southwest Texas (Terrell County) in 1980.

Llewellyn Moss is an antelope hunter and Vietnam War veteran who stumbles across the aftermath of a drug-related gun battle which has left everyone dead save a single badly wounded Mexican. Moss finds a truck full of heroin and a satchel with $2.4 million in cash. He takes the money, but leaves the Mexican alive, which ignites a hunt for Moss that stretches for most of the remaining novel.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell investigates the drug crime while trying to protect Moss and his young wife with the aid of other law enforcement. The sheriff is haunted by his actions in World War II, for which he received the Bronze Star Medal. Now in his late 50s, Bell has spent most of his life attempting to make up for the incident when he was a 21-year-old soldier. He makes it his quest to resolve the case and save Moss.

Complicating things is the arrival of Anton Chigurh, a violent sociopath hired to recover the money. Chigurh uses a captive bolt pistol (called a cattlegun in the text) to kill many of his victims and destroy several cylinder locks to open doors. In one of his final murders described in the book, he gives a long speech about causality and fate to his victim. Wells, a rival hitman and ex-partner of Chigurh, is also on the trail of the money.

McCarthy tells the story in two voices. The bulk of the book is presented in third person, interspersed with first person reminiscences from Sheriff Bell. The reliance on dialogue and the sketchbook revelation of plot details lend a mystical air to the work. For example:

…when you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon something that you may not very well be equal to… When you've said that it's real and not just in your head, I'm not all that sure what it is you have said.

Literary significance and criticism

William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15 2005), characterizes McCarthy as "our greatest living writer" and describes the book as "a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames."^[1] On the other hand, in the July 24, 2005, issue of the New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum," but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages."^[2] Peter Travers (with Rolling Stone magazine) declared the movie the Best of 2007.^[3]

Film adaptation

A film adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen was released in 2007 to critical acclaim.

In an odd coincidence, there is a passing reference in the novel (page 216) to the real-life 1979 murder in San Antonio of federal judge John Wood. The convicted killer of Judge Wood was Charles Harrelson, the father of Woody Harrelson, who plays Carson Wells in the film version.

References