But he is no spokesman for that establishment. There are few prizes and grants in the gift of the literary establishment that he has not received. Īpparently Cormac McCarthy is a recluse, refusing to speak save in his fiction. God has the battle been so Manichean.” Does belief in God and Satan make one a Manichean? No matter, the remark is an intimation of what this magnificent novel is about. One called the novel “a race with the devil on a stage as big as Texas.” Another called it “a scary illumination of the oncoming darkness.” And another wrote, “Perhaps not since Satan vs. Many reviewers of McCarthy’s novel got the point after all. Perhaps the alternative to the loss of innocence is preferable.
#ABSCISSA NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN MOVIE#
The movie based on that novel portrays this decision as the stodgy conventionality of a thwarted man. European sophistication, a woman’s right to divorce, the alternative to Christian morality? Newland Archer, at the end of that novel, declines in old age a visit to the woman with whom he once intended to run away. Exactly what her Gilded Age New Yorkers are innocent of is wonderfully ambiguous. One can see its roots already in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Much of our fiction moves comfortably within the parameters of liberal received opinion. His believers were disarmingly mad, but the indirect point seemed to be, if this be madness, how is the outlook of non-believers to be described? When abortion and euthanasia, to say nothing of other once widely recognized sins, achieve the status of human rights, faith must be regarded as folly. Walker Percy, until his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, enjoyed a wide popularity. Catholicism figures not at all in No Country For Old Men, save in a few obiter dicta. On his web site he is described as “having been raised Roman Catholic,” which suggests that in his middle years, as with Sheriff Bell, his belief waned. If it it, his enormous popularity is baffling. I have no idea whether this novel is typical of Cormac McCarthy’s work. Why do so many people want to destroy themselves with drugs? Bell is more puzzled by the users than the suppliers. The drug wars along the border are the great metaphor of the novel, a metaphor that works because it is so realistically conveyed. How did we get to this point? Bell wonders if it wasn’t when we stopped saying Ma’am and Sir.Ĭall that an appeal to natural decency, to the common morality, but without the underpinning of belief in God, and Satan, it will inevitably be eroded. And she’ll be able to put her grandma to death as well. He recalls a woman grousing about the right wing saying that all she wants is to be assured that her granddaughter will be able to have an abortion. Bell is a Job-like figure whose complaint may seem to be merely a political one. A reader who runs as he reads may miss this in the novel but it is inescapably there. Anton Chigurh sees himself as delivering a kind of justice. What the movie misses and the novel more or less obliquely provides is a Christian interpretation. In No Country for Old Men, the truly guilty elude the criminal justice system, and an understanding of justice eludes those punished by the law. He explains a lot of things that otherwise don’t have no explanation.
Now I’m startin’ to lean back the other way. Come the middle years my belief I reckon had waned somewhat. They said I know but do you? I had to think about that.
I told that to somebody at breakfast the other mornin’ and they asked me if I believed in Satan. But for whatever reason he did not confront Bell.I think that if you were Satan and you were settin’ around tryin to think up something that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics. I'm still a bit uncertain where he was hiding but he was clearly near-by as you saw him in the shadows. So after the crime scene had been closed up he went to the room, popped the lock, found the bag and was in the process of leaving when Bell shows up the second time. The Mexicans didn't know Lewelln's trick of hiding the bag in the a/c vent and didn't have time to look for it with all the commotion they caused with the gun fight with Lewelln.Ĭhigurh got the money later. I think he got the money, not the Mexicans. But the money was likely recovered by him days or weeks before (once the crime scene had been closed up by the cops). The car accident comes immediately after he leaves her house. Chigurh was the type of person who would not let the wife live but wasn't in a rush to kill her. I suspect it could have been days or weeks after. The scene where he has the car accident is not immediately after Lewelln was killed.
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