Some reviewers have complained of the action movie-like pacing in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. With the forthcoming release of the Coen brothers’ film version, now marks an appropriate time to reexamine the novel. The brutality flies fast and fierce in the book, punctuated with moments of meditation and humor. After writing so many Westerns, McCarthy finally allows himself to enjoy channeling Sergio Leone, as he does briefly when the good, bad and ugly trio of Moss, Chigurh and Wells share the same stage.
It’s not all funny, though. Like Phillip Roth and Salman Rushdie before him, McCarthy examines the havoc the Vietnam war wrought on American consciousness. Readers familiar with McCarthy will recognize the setting: the bloodstained ground of the Texas-Mexico borderlands. However, this time McCarthy trades cowboys and Indians for 1980s hit men and drug dealers. But these aren’t traditional outlaws; the hordes of killers in the novel are government-trained. McCarthy’s US Military makes these men murderers, but he is less ready to blame Vietnam for the shift in American consciousness and morality. He questions if the war was merely a symptom of violence born from history and blood.
A novel examining Vietnam in contemporary America unquestionably concerns itself with the current conflict in Iraq. Sheriff Bell, after confessing his decision to desert his unit of wounded troops in WWII to save his life, describes his choice to retire from police work as a resolution to “cut and run.” McCarthy’s stage is a quarter-century behind, but the author engages the current war with this highly charged political language, finding himself disenchanted with violence masquerading as patriotism.
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