LITERATURE: No Country for Old Men – Finale

Yesterday between the pies and turkey, I finished reading Cormac MacCarthy’s No Country.  And I’m still thinkin’ on it.

Despite the action of the story, there is some depth of human nature here; as with most McCarthy, it dwells on the evil side.  We have Sheriff Bell, a sometimes first-person narrator of both events of the story, and of his own philosophies and worries about life.  He’s getting older, he’s facing criminals who are more daring, more flamboyant, more conscienceless than ever before.  Retirement to a happy home life with a wife he dearly loves and cherishes, and facing his own demons of his actions in war seems to be set upon a balancing scale of what he sees going on with the drama of Moss and Chigurh and the drug dealers.  Simply put, the world is going to hell in a handbasket and with this, it softens it to an aging mental frame of mind.

But Anton Chigurh still intrigues me somewhat.  He too, it seems, is a philosopher.  With little respect for human life other than his own–and maybe that too is not that valuable–he appears to kill without care.  And yet, his conversations with Moss, with Wells, and with Moss’ wife, Carla Jean seem to imply a more complex road to his decisions.  He wants to tell his victims how he is, and how life is, and how wrong they were to think it any different than meaningless.  But is this it–or is it that he’s really seeking someone who can tell him that he’s the one that’s wrong about it all. 

Chigurh claims he has no enemies.  True, because he doesn’t leave them alive.  But I see something else; I see him saying that he has no one who can call him a liar.  In disappointment at their half-hearted attempts to argue and so convince him otherwise, he kills them.  This validates his reasoning.  And yet he goes on killing, seeking answers and never finding them. I see him hoping for some conclusive revelation that runs concurrent with Sheriff Bell’s decision to retire.

Not the prose of previous novels, and not the mystery (except in keeping track of who is opening up a scene), and not up to the levels of Blood Meridian, or Suttree, or Child of God, but still, better than a whole lot of what’s out there.