THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; On the Loose in Badlands: Killer With a Cattle Gun
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 18, 2005, Monday
No Country for Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy
309 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95
Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, ''No Country for Old Men,'' gets off to a
riveting start as a sort of new wave, hard-boiled Western: imagine Quentin
Tarantino doing a self-conscious riff on Sam Peckinpah and filming a fast,
violent story about a stone-cold killer, a small-town sheriff and an average
Joe who stumbles across a leather case filled with more than $2 million in
hot drug money.
Intercut with this gripping tale, however, are the sheriff's portentous
meditations on life and fate and the decline and fall of Western civilization.
These lugubrious passages, reminiscent of the most pretentious sections of
earlier McCarthy novels like ''The Crossing,'' gain ascendancy as the book
progresses and gradually weigh down the quicksilver suspense of the larger
story.
Sheriff Bell, we learn, is haunted by a ''Lord Jim''-like episode from
his past. Although he won a bronze star during World War II, he was guilty
of an act of cowardice that contributed to the deaths of many men in his unit.
Ever since then, he has been trying to make amends, looking upon his job as
sheriff as a second chance to prove himself.
Mr. McCarthy has always vascillated between clean, Hemingwayesque prose
and pseudo-Faulknerian grandiloquence, and in this novel, he makes poor
Bell the mouthpiece of his most ponderous, sentimental and high-falutin'
musings. Bell blathers on about how the country is changing for the worse,
how there has been a decline in good manners and a rise in horrendous crimes,
how people nowadays ''dont have no respect for the law'' -- -- ''dont even
think about the law.'' ''Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam,''he observes,
''the end is pretty much in sight.'' Certainly the current case that Bell
is investigating is a particularly nasty bit of business: out in the border
country near Mexico, half a dozen bodies have been found, along with a dead
dog and signs of a missing heroin stash. To make matters worse,a mounting
number of deaths appear to be related to this massacre -- beginning with
the strangling of a sheriff's deputy by an escaped prisoner who proceeds
to hijack a car and kill its driver on his way to committing even bloodier
and more senseless deeds.
This escaped prisoner is named Chigurh, and like the mad, nihilistic Judge
Holden in ''Blood Meridian,'' he embodies the violence and evil that
Mr. McCarthy sees at the heart of the human enterprise -- the conviction,
as the judge put it, that the only man who has truly lived is the ''man who
has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor
of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks
to his inmost heart.''
Chigurh's favorite means of killing is a pneumatic air gun (like those
used in cattle stockyards) that shoots a plunger into a man's brains. He
has a sadistic taste for taunting his victims before he kills them and
likes to think of himself as adhering to some sort of ancient Hobbesian
code of war.His grisly killing spree is chronicled by Mr. McCarthy with
a keen sense of verisimilitude, made up in equal parts of chilling technical
detail and an almost lyrical appreciation of the ritual of bloodshed.
''There's no one alive on this planet that's ever had even a cross word
with him,'' says one character who's made the acquaintance of Chigurh.
''They're all dead. These are not good odds. He's a peculiar man.
You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money
or drugs or anything like that.'' The man on the run from Chigurh is a
Vietnam veteran named Llewelyn Moss, a man who plays a similar role in this
novel to that of John Grady in ''All the Pretty Horses'' and ''Cities of
the Plain'' -- someone with whom the reader can sympathize and root for
in his quixotic and seemingly doomed quest. In this case, that quest means
getting away with the money he's found at the shootout scene and starting
a new life with his beloved wife some place far away. It is also a quest
that involves crossing and recrossing the Mexican border -- that most
metaphorical of Maginot lines in Mr. McCarthy's fiction -- in an effort
to elude Chigurh,the authorities and all the other people who might be
pursuing him.
Mr. McCarthy turns the elaborate cat-and-mouse game played by Moss and
Chigurh and Bell into harrowing, propulsive drama, cutting from one
frightening, violent set piece to another with cinematic economy and
precision. In fact, ''No Country for Old Men'' would easily translate to
the big screen so long as Bell's tedious, long-winded monologues were left
on the cutting room floor -- a move that would also have made this a
considerably more persuasive novel.
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★Junchoon 哈哈
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