No Country for Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy
Reviewed by James Tipton

      Cormac McCarthy is best known for his Border Trilogy, three novels set along the Texas-Mexico border, the first of which, All the Pretty Horses, is set almost entirely in Mexico, south of the Texas border, and which won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 
      In his recent (but not latest) novel, No Country for Old Men (2005), Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, although unlike the Border Trilogy which is set in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the time is now closer to our own, the early 1980s. 
      Llewellyn Moss, the protagonist, is a Vietnam vet and a generic good old boy. While hunting antelope near the Mexican border Moss stumbles into a clearing where he finds the bodies of several men brutally murdered, packages of heroin behind the seat of a pickup, and in a leather document case, two-million-four-hundred-thousand dollars in cash. Moss stashes it in his trailer house. Later that night he leaves his young wife in bed to return on a trip of mercy to take water to one of the victims he thinks might still be alive. He discovers that men with guns are waiting for him and he says to himself, "There is no description of a fool…that you fail to satisfy."
      Caught in the middle of a drug war, Moss sends his nineteen-year-old wife, Carla Jean, into hiding, and then goes on the run, with the chase playing out on both sides of the bloody Texas-Mexico border. 
      An aging Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (as well as his wife Loretta) is decent-hearted, and his self-searching (and sometimes tedious) monologues add some comfort to familiar moral territory to the otherwise dark mood of the book. 
      The psychopathic killer, Anton Chigurh, is terrifying. He is an intellectual, and even witty in a grotesque way, fascinated in fact by the "art" he has created in the random murders he commits, using a slaughterhouse stun gun with a pneumatic device designed to shoot out a retractable steel bolt into the heads of cattle.  
      Sheriff Bell, feeling old and unable to fathom the enormous and destructive changes that have taken place in the psyche of his country and his own beloved county in Texas seeks out the wisdom of his old, crippled uncle:
      "You ain’t turned infidel, have you, Uncle Ellis?"
      "No. Nothing like that."
      "Do you think God knows what’s happening?"
      "I expect he does."
      "You think He can stop it?"
      "No. I don’t."
      FLASH: The movie based on the book has won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.