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Cormac McCarthy

No Country for Old Men (Vintage International) Paperback – October 9, 2007

by Cormac McCarthy (Author)

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In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

Print length

309 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

October 9, 2007
Dimensions

5.16 x 0.64 x 8.01 inches
ISBN-10

9780307387134
ISBN-13

978-0307387134
Lexile measure

HL610L
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
Highlighted by 1,921 Kindle readers
It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.
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Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered.”
—The Washington Post

“Feels like a genuine diagnosis of the postmillennial malady, a scary illumination of the oncoming darkness.”
—Time

“He is nothing less than our greatest living writer, and this is a novel that must be read and remembered.”
—Houston Chronicle

“Riveting. . . . A harrowing, propulsive drama.”
—The New York Times

“This is a monster of a book. . . . It will leave you panting and awestruck.”
—Sam Shepard

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy is one of America’s most honored writers. He has won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent novel, The Road, received the Pulitzer Prize.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I

I sent one boy to the gaschamber at Huntsville. One and only one. My arrest and my testimony. I went up there and visited with him two or three times. Three times. The last time was the day of his execution. I didnt have to go but I did. I sure didnt want to. He’d killed a fourteen year old girl and I can tell you right now I never did have no great desire to visit with him let alone go to his execution but I done it. The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He’d been datin this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind. I watched them strap him into the seat and shut the door. He might of looked a bit nervous about it but that was about all. I really believe that he knew he was goin to be in hell in fifteen minutes. I believe that. And I’ve thought about that a lot. He was not hard to talk to. Called me Sheriff. But I didnt know what to say to him. What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasnt nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I dont know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I’d as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that’s where this is goin. It has done brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I’d of come to. Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older. I wish that it was. I cant say that it’s even what you are willin to do. Because I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glorious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they’ll know it. They’ll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.

The deputy left Chigurh standing in the corner of the office with his hands cuffed behind him while he sat in the swivelchair and took off his hat and put his feet up and called Lamar on the mobile.

Just walked in the door. Sheriff he had some sort of thing on him like one of them oxygen tanks for emphysema or whatever. Then he had a hose that run down the inside of his sleeve and went to one of them stunguns like they use at the slaughterhouse. Yessir. Well that’s what it looks like. You can see it when you get in. Yessir. I got it covered. Yessir.

When he stood up out of the chair he swung the keys off his belt and opened the locked desk drawer to get the keys to the jail. He was slightly bent over when Chigurh squatted and scooted his manacled hands beneath him to the back of his knees. In the same motion he sat and rocked backward and passed the chain under his feet and then stood instantly and effortlessly. If it looked like a thing he’d practiced many times it was. He dropped his cuffed hands over the deputy’s head and leaped into the air and slammed both knees against the back of the deputy’s neck and hauled back on the chain.

They went to the floor. The deputy was trying to get his hands inside the chain but he could not. Chigurh lay there pulling back on the bracelets with his knees between his arms and his face averted. The deputy was flailing wildly and he’d begun to walk sideways over the floor in a circle, kicking over the wastebasket, kicking the chair across the room. He kicked shut the door and he wrapped the throwrug in a wad about them. He was gurgling and bleeding from the mouth. He was strangling on his own blood. Chigurh only hauled the harder. The nickelplated cuffs bit to the bone. The deputy’s right carotid artery burst and a jet of blood shot across the room and hit the wall and ran down it. The deputy’s legs slowed and then stopped. He lay jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether. Chigurh lay breathing quietly, holding him. When he got up he took the keys from the deputy’s belt and released himself and put the deputy’s revolver in the waistband of his trousers and went into the bathroom.

He ran cold water over his wrists until they stopped bleeding and he tore strips from a handtowel with his teeth and wrapped his wrists and went back into the office. He sat on the desk and fastened the toweling with tape from a dispenser, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. When he was done he got the deputy’s wallet out of his pocket and took the money and put it in the pocket of his shirt and dropped the wallet to the floor. Then he picked up his airtank and the stungun and walked out the door and got into the deputy’s car and started the engine and backed around and pulled out and headed up the road.

On the interstate he picked out a late model Ford sedan with a single driver and turned on the lights and hit the siren briefly. The car pulled onto the shoulder. Chigurh pulled in behind him and shut off the engine and slung the tank across his shoulder and stepped out. The man was watching him in the rearview mirror as he walked up.

What’s the problem, officer? he said.

Sir would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?

The man opened the door and stepped out. What’s this about? he said.

Would you step away from the vehicle please.

The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. I just didnt want you to get blood on the car, he said.

Moss sat with the heels of his boots dug into the volcanic gravel of the ridge and glassed the desert below him with a pair of twelve power german binoculars. His hat pushed back on his head. Elbows propped on his knees. The rifle strapped over his shoulder with a harnessleather sling was a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut. It carried a Unertl telescopic sight of the same power as the binoculars. The antelope were a little under a mile away. The sun was up less than an hour and the shadow of the ridge and the datilla and the rocks fell far out across the floodplain below him. Somewhere out there was the shadow of Moss himself. He lowered the binoculars and sat studying the land. Far to the south the raw mountains of Mexico. The breaks of the river. To the west the baked terracotta terrain of the run- ning borderlands. He spat dryly and wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his cotton workshirt.

The rifle would shoot half minute of angle groups. Five inch groups at one thousand yards. The spot he’d picked to shoot from lay just below a long talus of lava scree and it would put him well within that distance. Except that it would take the better part of an hour to get there and the antelope were grazing away from him. The best he could say about any of it was that there was no wind.

When he got to the foot of the talus he raised himself slowly and looked for the antelope. They’d not moved far from where he last saw them but the shot was still a good seven hundred yards. He studied the animals through the binoculars. In the compressed air motes and heat distortion. A low haze of shimmering dust and pollen. There was no other cover and there wasnt going to be any other shot.

He wallowed down in the scree and pulled off one boot and laid it over the rocks and lowered the forearm of the rifle down into the leather and pushed off the safety with his thumb and sighted through the scope.

They stood with their heads up, all of them, looking at him.

Damn, he whispered. The sun was behind him so they couldnt very well have seen light reflect off the glass of the scope. They had just flat seen him.

The rifle had a Canjar trigger set to nine ounces and he pulled the rifle and the boot toward him with great care and sighted again and jacked the crosshairs slightly up the back of the animal standing most broadly to him. He knew the exact drop of the bullet in hundred yard increments. It was the distance that was uncertain. He laid his finger in the curve of the trigger. The boar’s tooth he wore on a gold chain spooled onto the rocks inside his elbow.

From the Hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0307387135
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reissue edition (October 9, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 309 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780307387134
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307387134
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ HL610L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.64 x 8.01 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #698,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,736 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #10,247 in Westerns (Books)
- #36,167 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of his next novel, Outer Dark. In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was published in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to 1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon thereafter, the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing, was published with the third volume, Cities of the Plain, following in 1998. McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men, was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was published in 2006 and won the Pulitzer Prize.

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James Barton Phelps

Dystopian Doom Drenched Fiction - But Superb Writing

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 14, 2012

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I read the book once-not carefully - and knew I didn't get it. Then I read it again with some care; and when I put it down that second time it bothered me that I still didn't know what the book was really about. Then I saw the movie and it cleared up a lot of it; but there were still things I didn't understand - locations, time lines, identities., who if anyone has the money at the end of the book Above all you need a map of West Texas to follow the story; and you need to consult it often. And now I have gone back once again to clear some things up and think about what McCarthy was really trying to say, if anything. And I'm still not sure. But I need to get this review off my mind. So to the extent that McCarthy was writing for a knowing audience the book is a flop. To the extent that once again McCarthy was showing off his superb writing skills - particularly his ability to give us a dystopian story, to write doom drenched fiction it was a success. Would I read it again? Probably. Would I recommend it to you? Depends.

About McCarthy as a writer: No one writing today can say so much or describe so much on one page as McCarthy - and in words of few syllables. Nor can anyone writing today bring the reader into the picture as well as McCarthy nor sketch a character as well nor write conversation so well that you can almost hear the Texas twang, the rural patois of a good old boy Texas lawman. Read a page of McCarthy describing Llewellyn Moss's first view of the scene of four burned shot-up trucks surrounded by three dead bodies and one wounded man in the Texas desert and you are right there. Listen to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell talk to his uncle Ellis and you are in the room with them. I just wish he would be clearer. Was this a requiem for the good old days in West Texas? Was it a tribute to the men of that time? Was it a study of evil? (Frankly I have the same questions in respect to his fascination with evil in the only other McCarthy books I have read - The Road and Blood Horizon ) Was sit a Jeremiad against the hippie generation? The narcotics trade? Or was it just a good story interspersed with a lot of philosophy, giving Melville a run for his money? I guess it was all of these things. But I wish now that, having put the book down, I really knew what he was trying to tell me.

The obvious story is fairly clear; Moss finds the trucks and the men in the Texas desert just this side of the border. Everyone is dead except the wounded man asking for water. (Moss has none.) One of the trucks is loaded with bricks of cocaine. There is a man lying dead by a briefcase under a tree. The briefcase holds 2.3 million in hundred dollar bills. Moss takes it. He returns that night with water, but the man has been shot and the cocaine is gone. He realizes too late that he may not be alone, all terrain four wheelers with lights are in the vicinity and he is spotted. He runs. And a lot of the rest of the narrative is the chase. Obviously two sides have been cheated - one of the drugs, one of the money - and both are out to find Moss and the money. The principle agent of the chase is a psychopathic killer with almost supernatural powers - Anton Chigurth who, armed with a compressed air bottle connected to a cattle stun gun and a sawed off shotgun, manages in two hundred blood stained pages to kill Moss, his wife, his mother in law, a deputy, an innocent citizen, two or three hotel clerks, the business man behind the drug dealing - all in separate killings - and then three Mexicans in a gun fight all together; and if you can tell me after reading this book how Chigurth managed to find all these people (even though a transponder was hidden in the cash and accounts for his presence in at lest one of he killings) I'll buy you a good dinner at a place of your choice. McCarthy, being the man he thinks he is, doesn't have to explain. Chigurth just appears And there is no denouement, no satisfaction, no justice, no catharsis Though injured Chigurth just walks away out of the pages. Evil, points out McCarthy, is still out there - and always will be.

That's the narrative; but it's not the story. The story is that West Texas has changed so much since the end of World War II to 1980 (the period in which the narrative is set) that it is no longer a country for old men; and that is lamentable. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man who is sure to steal your heart, tells the story in his own words, about how things are now, how things were then, what men should be like, about his opinions on life in first person italicized ruminations which begin and end the book and which are often interspersed into the narrative. They are the guts of what McCarthy has to say about life; and they are worth reading. The rest of the stuff is just well written bloody crime stuff. You'll love Ed Tom and adore his wife Lorraine who, though unready, cheerfully goes into retirement with Ed Tom who, after thirty-five years of being a sheriff. finds it is no country for old men.
JBP - December 2007

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Jay Stafford

Very good book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 24, 2022

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This was almost a great book, so good that the movie was almost a carbon copy with very few changes. I actually like the author's lack of punctuation, apostrophes, etc - it lent a gritty reality to the story.

The plot had too many twists and unexplained characters for me to follow completely, however. For example, I never figured out who was in the black Barracuda. I also hoped for more details in the book regarding Chigurh's background, but didn't get any - he was just a mysterious dude who could kill anybody he wanted and never get caught.

Last but not least, the main character is an obvious old style Texan, with an extreme right wing "moral" philosophy dating back to the 1800's. It ain't that simple anymore, like it or not.

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Sir Charles Panther

A Man Could Lose His Soul...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 20, 2008

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Man finds lots of money. Man runs, is pursued. Many casualties ensue.

I came to McCarthy by way of The Road (Oprah's Book Club) , which was one of the most profoundly moving things I've read in fifteen years; I find myself thinking of that book and its setting, questions and issues almost daily. Through it I became aware of McCarthy's other work, and was eager to get to it. Then came the Coen brothers' brilliant No Country for Old Men , and I had to move this up in the reading queue. I did save the film until after I was done with the book, and I'm glad I did; this is better.

As in The Road, there are many unanswered questions about aspects of the story off the main narrative line--who did what, where characters and events came from, where they go, what happens next, etc. They are tantalizing, an aspect I have found that keeps McCarthy's work in my head, sorting through the unexplained, wondering in which way these superfluous stories could have gone. They are a great hook, providing tangential snippets of context to a circuitous, unpredictable yet headlong single story line.

This story is deceptive, beginning as a very west Texas noir tale of adventure. I was reminded of James Dickey's magnificent DELIVERANCE (BLOOMSBURY FILM CLASSICS S.) . But while Deliverance was Dickey's rumination on what exactly it means to be a man in the age of the office job, Lay Z Boy recliners and strip malls, McCarthy posits a much more simple question: are you ready to be a man when the time comes?

When Life--with that capital L--comes at you and delivers unbidden the horrific, tragic or sublimely blissful, will you be ready? Can you make yourself ready; is there any way to prepare? And if you think you're ready, are you really? McCarthy asks: what have you done, and in the same breath, what have you not done? What have you overlooked, and what--this is crucial--happens to you and others depending on how ready you are? What are you prepared to do? How far will you go?

Being ready means being prepared to act instantly, outside of cultural and societal norms, against your upbringing and your education, at the most basic level, not unthinkingly, but unflinchingly and uncompromisingly. Can you strip it all away, and if you do what does that make you? Can you come back?

This is where a man can lose his soul. Both The Road and this work make it clear that there is a point where a man chooses to keep or forfeit his humanity, his dignity, when he chooses decency over barbarism. McCarthy's exploration shows that when the choice--made consciously--is for dignity and righteousness, ultimately it is self-destructive.

McCarthy's work has a place for those who hold on to that uniquely human core of decency, who see what really needs to be done, the ugly and brutal which may need to be done for survival, and in essence condemn themselves, usually wittingly, by remaining true to decency and the care/service of others. Death is coming for us all, only a matter of time, so why not take a stand and choose your time and place, and do it with a self-determined honor, with a clean slate? There may be a reckoning--that's really as far as I see McCarthy going down that road of Good v. Evil, God v. Satan--but if there is, these decisions will tip that scale, and for those that remain behind you live on as an example of the right choice.

The book's style is sparse, matching the desert and scrubland the story inhabits. McCarthy's narrative convention of not using quotations is here, but is neither a distraction nor does it lend to confusion. The narrative structure is essentially cinematic, with the sheriff-narrator providing a voiceover context, the real depth of the story, and the chapters often moving in parallel. The dialog flows as easily and effortlessly as Elmore Leonard's best, and there is no question as to what is happening in the narrative.

Surprisingly, the "action," the main story, was done well before the book was. The bulk of the book and the story of money, guns and blood exists as the extended setup for one man's rumination on life's purpose, the existence of God, and what it means to be true to yourself, those you love, and those you serve. This is the last 40-odd pages of the book, and where the deepest contemplation lies. There is a lot going on here, with a lot of to my reading earnest exploration of a man's purpose, his honor, his character, and ultimately his identity. Is God out there? And if he is, and if he's the kind of guy we've all been told he is, how is it that life plays out in these ways?

Bottom line: This is no happy, light and frothy, stereotypically inane TV-style read of a luckless loner who makes good after some minor tribulation. The story is stark and dark, violent and unflinching, just as life is. McCarthy poses a pessimistic vision of where we are and where we are headed, and explores whether the noble choice of decency and selflessness is tenable, even though it seems to be suicidal.

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Q513

Great Story

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 9, 2022

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McCarthy did not disappoint with this very poignant story. It's haunting and elegantly written. This story will stay with you and is definitely worthy of being read again.

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David K. Warner

A minimalist masterpiece of moral storytelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 7, 2021

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This modern western, set in 1980 in the Badlands of western Texas, a world made familiar by Cormac McCarthy's other books, is quite simply a masterpiece of minimalist storytelling, a work of morality conveyed in sparse dialogue that sets a tale of compromised good versus calculating evil against the background of the fading promise of America made plain by the nightmare of Vietnam, its aftermath, and societal descent into drugs. It is a portrait of a world in pain, and a portent of the opioid addicted and crime-ridden small town America of today.
The novel is framed by the thoughts of the aging and upright Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a man of integrity and simplicity haunted by past errors, faced by an increasingly violent society which he struggles to understand and which is incompatible with the purer, more moral world of his memory and family lore. Bell is a man adrift, but also a man whose self-awareness provides a nuanced perspective upon the brutal and murderous drug trade which has infected his county and brought horrific death to his doorstep. Bell might not know why men do the wrongs they do, but he tries hard to understand what leads them down paths that will lead to their destruction, although recognising that whatever his efforts, he cannot prevent others from that rendezvous with death their choices will bring. But Bell's empathy and compassion provide no guide when faced with the amoral killing machine, Anton Chigurch, an evil demiurge, part Biblical demon, part classical representation of Nemesis. Chigurch is Fate made human for those who come into his realm of death and retribution, even those innocent of wrongdoing, whose violent end is but collateral damage in a world where violence not only begets violence, but where violence and mortality are mere events in an inevitable process of reckoning.
The tone, as usual with McCarthy, is laconic and elegiac, with beautifully drawn characters, whose moral reality is clear in their words and their actions. It is a novel written with beautiful simplicity about a world made complex by the failures of men to stay true to the simple truths that experience has revealed as the best basis for a better world.
This is a profoundly moral and thoughtful book that is a worthy entry in the canon of great American novels, and Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American novelists.

9 people found this helpful

charlesowen

Now for Something Different/ A Must Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 8, 2021

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Extraordinary prose. A cannot put down book. Gritty & cruel, everything you would hope won’t happen does.
Characterisations of the three main protagonists wonderful.
Even the ending leaves you with the thought, did they get the right man.
That’s the reality of life. Ninety one percent of books leave you feeling good, “right has prevailed over might”.
This one tells the way things really are, evil can & does prevail despite our best wishes.
Finally, a wonderful discussion on social trends over the generations.

7 people found this helpful

Rev. Andy

Hard to read (literally)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 10, 2022

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I found this a struggle to work through. Things like not having quotation marks around speech, very slight & fleeting references to people & places in a scene, lack of clarity about who was speaking in a dialogue. The story didn't have much for me either but the effort involved in trying to work out what was meant probably didn't help.

3 people found this helpful

gaz

One of the most frustrating novels to read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 1, 2020

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I hadn't watched the film beforehand. Came into this without context and the author does very little to fill that in. Multiple references to him/he or her/she at the beginning of chapters without explaining who they are. Locations not explained, timeframes often missing especially at the beginning when it'll just be 2.30 not explaining whether it's AM or PM (not useful as you don't know anything about the characters or the story by this point). Still don't know if all the start of chapter monologues are from the same character or not. They go off into rambles that might have made ore sense if I'd know who was giving them but then again I'm not going to give that much credit.

I wanted to give up several times and actually wish I had because I took virtually nothing from finishing this read. Utterly frustrating and a waste of time.

4 people found this helpful

Gert and Daisy

No Country for old men class

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 21, 2020

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This book again shows how many brilliant writers there is out there this is dare I say it a classic it has everything suspense drama brilliant dialogue and above all a subtle menace about it that keeps you hooked. The rich Texas accent and phrases shine through a give the book even more character it just works on every level for me. I loved it but it did also make me think that there is a big bad world out there and some very strange people in it, scary man.

2 people found this helpful

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