No Country For Old Men
By Cormac McCarthy
Alfred E. Knopf publisher
Fiction, 309 pgs., 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8

“IT STARTS WHEN YOU BEGIN TO OVERLOOK BAD MANNERS.”

I was warned, or at least took it as a warning, not to read Cormac McCarthy, by a professor of literature whose command of the subject in general and Southern literature in particular is not to be dismissed. McCarthy, the professor said, was “Southern Gothic,” a term pregnant with images that conjure up incestuous backwoodsmen and all those nasty stereotypical insults that trouble not the doyennes of political correctness, since the acid tipped barbs, ethnic slurs, and calumnies are aimed at rural white Southerners.

It was a careless moment. Standing in the library beside the “current fiction” bookcase, waiting for my wife to gather her books, tapes, and movies kindly bequeathed by a caring lady long dead and in her grave. We do have a fondness for the late Mrs. Lepper, may she rest in peace.

My eyes, encased in bifocals, fell upon a red book that I slipped off the shelf and brought close enough to my face to read the title, No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy!

A voice, deep inside, said, “Oh, go ahead, read it!”

A diabolical temptation if ever there was one.

I succumbed.

McCarthy’s work began with the publication of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. However, it was not until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 that he stormed to the top of the writing profession, winning the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction and subsequently refusing to attend the award ceremony. Labeled an eccentric — though we shouldn’t be too critical of anyone who sticks his finger in the eye of the east coast literati — McCarthy has granted few interviews and you’re not likely to see him on the Oprah Winfrey show anytime soon.

Cormac McCarthy illustrates his lament by commingling human beings with that which passes for the specie. It is the mark of modernity he examines, the signs that herald the decline, the end of the bourgeois age ironically instituted by the technique and technology that lifted the unwashed, at least materially and tenuously, into the high rise. Modern man, his ennui, his decline into madness, grotesque violence, and sin are juxtaposed among a dwindling remnant that continues to live in God’s mystery.

Just as the painter provides a landscape, a backdrop in his study, McCarthy paints the land in words both profound and innocently simple. The land is the nexus of the primordial continuum, to the mystery; there are no human beings without reference to place.

In his latest novel, No Country For Old Men, McCarthy provocatively defines the epitome of the Darwinian postulation. The antagonist, Anton Chigurh, with air tank and stun gun (and just about any weapon he chooses), is that much heralded and merciless Angel of Death, given to the theology of� “instruments” and “accountings,” and searching the eyes at the moment of death. He is the ultimate iconoclast so appallingly perverse that there arises a philosophical asymmetry; “the traditional metaphysical attempt to acquire knowledge of God,” devolves into a hubristic blasphemy.

Is Anton Chigurh mad? I think not; he is the flower of the Enlightenment, he is rationalism triumphant!

The protagonist is Sheriff Bell, a survivor of the European Theatre and a man who candidly admits he “wanted people to listen to what I had to say.” The sheriff is a “good” man — and they are indeed hard to find — who “thought I could at least someway put things to right,” but now “I just don’t feel that way anymore.”

If the “good” is shriveling in the post-modern era, if the decline is as precipitous as McCarthy writes, then the hope, the yearning, for a restoration� lies outside any epistemology conjured by the mind. Indeed, McCarthy adumbrates the necessity of a spiritual redemption in an age where Original Sin is incomprehensible, a direction that deserves his nimble acuity and facile pen.

McCarthy’s awareness of evil appears to have driven this talented man to the precipice of a profound nihilism, verging on hopelessness. But the old tradition tells us it is God’s plan. As the fey John of Patmos has written: “Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

It will indeed be a day of reckoning, a day of divine judgment, terrible to behold. But, when it is finished, St. John writes: “Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.”

No Country for Old Men is available on Amazon.com.