No Country for Old Men Cormac McCarthy Picador, 309pp, £16.99 ISBN 0330440101

Dust-scoured, four-street railroad towns. Landscapes where the dead lie one day, and leave no marks the next. A malevolent earth practising a slow cruelty on those who struggle across its surface. It's good to be back in Cormac McCarthy's Texas.

It's a country created by this great American novelist, the author of violent fables about people governed only by their own harsh morality and animal affinity to nature, but it's no country for old men. And yet McCarthy himself seems to have become an old man. "A lot of the time I say anything about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I'm getting old," says his most sympathetic character, a sheriff named Ed Tom Bell.

The novel's opening is McCarthy at his most elegant. Llewelyn Moss, an ex- Vietnam sniper, is hunting antelope in the "baked terracotta terrain of the running borderlands". Chasing down a wounded animal, he crests a ridge to find a violent modern tableau below, the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. Among the shot-up cars and shot-up people, he discovers money - "two point four million" to be exact.

It's not an original scenario, but McCarthy makes it new through the quality of his writing. Moss worries about being shot as he follows a bloody trail, and heads for the high country. "Nothing wounded goes uphill, he said. It just dont happen." Inevitably people come looking for the money, among them Anton Chigurh (rhymes with sugar). Chigurh's enemies are all dead, as are their friends, relatives and, most probably, their neighbours.

The book is both a pacey modern western and an imagining of how Sheriff Bell, 41 years in office without a murder left unsolved, deals with the modern horror "coming down the pike". Yet, for an exploration of violence, No Country for Old Men feels curiously light. It lacks the spiralling sentences that draw the reader into Blood Meridian, that glowing tale of unrestrained horror in which McCarthy showed his brilliance. Nor does it have the evocation of nature that made All the Pretty Horses an international bestseller. It relies on a dialogue that can seem to struggle a little out on its own: "It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?" "If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here."

However, No Country for Old Men is still the work of an author with exquisite sensibilities, whose journey towards that lawless border country has been charted in an increasingly clear and original voice, as he himself has moved from Rhode Island to Tennessee to Texas. Sheriff Bell, we discover, was involved in the liberation of Europe, and returned home a reluctant hero. He believes he is undeserving of his medals and has tried to make amends by protecting his people to the point where he would be prepared to die in office. "Not to sound glorious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they'll know it. They'll see it in a heartbeat."

He struggles to follow Chigurh's pursuit of Moss, finding that modern murder requires him to look into the eyes of "the living prophet of destruction". Better, he discovers, to look into the eyes of his wife, whom he loves with a touching gratitude.

Some authors age better than others, and No Country for Old Men seems to show what happens when an American great, an individualist, probably a Republican, rejects God and so fails to make sense of the world. Some, like Johnny Cash, produce a song like "Hurt". Others choose love and the doubt of old age.

Ruaridh Nicoll's most recent novel is Wide Eyed (Black Swan)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website