The year is 1980, the Mexican drug cartels are sweeping along the Untied States-Mexico border, drugs are being sold like caviar at the Bullingdon Club. Llewelyn Moss the standard Vietnam veteran come tough guy stumbles across a briefcase in the Southern American outback, inside the briefcase he finds millions of dollars. He takes the money and is pursued by carious drug cartels for days on end, staying at various motels and encountering various bad people along the way. Ultimately he is tracked down and killed by the protagonist Anton Chigurh, a hitman who endures wild psychopathic tendencies as well as being completely amoral, as such he is endlessly engaging. Somewhere in there, there is a moral message about money being unable to bring you happiness, but the fact that the main bad guy steals the money and lives ever after would appear to conflate this. Simultaneously Sheriff Ed Tom Bell works tirelessly to reclaim his once traditional town from the drug dealers, he is not as interesting as the other characters and he himself becomes an extended metaphor for the loss of values and morality. He has mixed success tracking down the drug cartels and for the most part ambles around thinking about his dead dad, he might be boring but he gets the last laugh, he doesn't die.
McCarthy has been described as 'our greatest living author,' and in a lot of respects No Country For Old Men justifies this title. It is incredibly well written, it has that incredible balance of making you feel saddened without feeling upset. It seems like a bit of a paradox but it is so very amoral that it illicit s no reaction, it manages to make the reader feel nothing which in many ways is worse than making us feel at all. Many suggest that we read to make ourselves feel more human, McCarthy goes the other way, we read his work to remind us that life isn't fair and that we may be less human than we think.
So far, my favourite book of 2012.
