Cormac McCarthy - No Country for Old Men (2005)

** spoiler alert **

No Country for Old Men is a great book at two levels - style and content. You have to engage with the laconic vernacular of the US Southwestern border country and observe how McCarthy uses it to show how a few words in the right context can get you far deeper into the emotions (or lack of them) of the main protagonists than any long-winded description of feelings. In forty years McCarthy has honed his art far from the excessive literariness of The Orchard Keeper to create a linguistic realism that is great literature.

He manages the rare feat of showing how a basic decency, a sentimental decency, triumphs morally over cunning and intellect. He reminds us that 'sentiment', that is feeling one's values as givens without too much analysis, is not to be despised by those whose default mode is knowing irony. There is nothing post-modern about this book. As for the content, this is a deeply political book, without once mentioning politics as most readers would understand it.
 

The story implies not so much a regret for lost values that other reviewers have noted and which may be obvious in the text (but which it is arguable provided a mere interlude of integrity between the normal condition of self-centred violence in the American West) but a gentle questioning of patriotism when your country has drifted far away from your own ideals and understanding, when you don't know what you are fighting for (and putting ourself at risk for) any more and when it asks too much and gives so little in return.

The American working man's experiences in America's wars overseas is a running theme 'sotto voce', underpinning the account of one incident in what is really a civil war in all but name, one in which government agents and drug runners seem to be fighting over who actually represents the will of the American people. Written in 2005 and before the 2008 crisis or the emergence of Trump, the book raises issues that are only now coming to the forefront of a historically complacent liberal middle class.

The Sheriff protagonist seems to understand that urban America has chosen the other side to his by providing markets for the 'criminals'. The killer Chigurh is almost a parody of the Ayn Rand libertarian in his peculiar a-social determination to 'succeed' on his own terms. He is out of the 'Fountainhead' but with crime rather than architecture and art the model. He should be fascinating but he is merely chilling - a half person compared to the otherwise apparently much weaker hero.

This book might appear to be an elegy for an older America which has been left behind (that is how most would like to interpret it), but this reader detected a darker mood, an implied anger that the betrayal of simpler souls in matters of war and peace has started to return home at the border between America and the world outside. A cold hell (represented by Chigurh) has seeped into the homeland, looking for opportunity. Of course, nothing is made quite that clear - but that is what happens in great art and this is great art. 

 

I got kick-back from some Americans for apparently over-politicising the reaction to the book in an earlier review elsewhere. It was more interesting to me that they were so sensitive to my claims. I certainly do not want to suggest that the book is about politics - it is far more sophisticated than that. What I meant was that books often have unconscious political aspects as authors reflect within themselves on the 'state we are in' just as American but not European popular culture often reflects 9/11 themes without always doing so consciously.

I felt that this book had a strong sense of crisis that was more than the usual inward-looking literary 'crisis of the person' that often dominates American writing and which, bluntly, I find increasingly tiresome and narcissistic. I welcomed McCarthy going well beyond this narcissism to observe the world in which Americans actually lived - to open the door to a consideration of the health of 'American culture'. Europeans (I am English) are often aware of a very self-conscious 'literariness' in American writing in which getting the exact description of a moment, a mood or a place are important (and McCarthy started out like this in The Orchard Keeper) but where big political and social issues are avoided or merely taken for granted as a set of prejudices the reader will share.

It is also as if politics as ideology must be avoided for fear of where reference to it may lead and as if partisan politics is just too damn crude for art. In fact most middle class liberal writing proves to be rather sly in preaching to the converted - to people like the author - and failing to try and get inside the minds of people who are not like them. To his credit, McCarthy makes that effort without ever seeming to abandon his own core values. At its worst, American literature can be writing about writing for writers - and so become so self-allusive that it is almost a way for college graduates to define themselves as both American and as educated against the seething masses. 

 

An egalitarian society finds it difficult to talk in terms of superiorities and so this becomes an assertion of difference, but as an almost aristocratic refinement of taste that, in effect, presents itself as de facto 'superior' when it is self-evidently not.  The crud that often appears under the rubric of American feature journalism on both East and West Coasts tends to confirm this cultural diagnosis - all self-affirmatory style and little substance, questioning or critical analysis.

This book struck me as moving to a new synthesis in which the careful crafting of language to get precision (but precision about the inner lives of persons above all) was matched by allusion to the wider conditions of life - and those conditions are necessarily historical, social and political. It was not blatant or crude or partisan just a redirection of mood about conditions in private life towards an indirect consideration of the public conditions that affect private life - a subtle but important difference. 

 

Anyway, it is an opinion and not a theory to be proved or disproved. American liberals have a stake in affirming each other as the world proves ever more threatening to them (and it will get worse) so I expect McCarthy's approach will remain more rare than America probably needs if it is to 'heal its wounds'.