WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF you were hunting near the Rio Grande and stumbled across some bloody corpses, a truck full of heroin and a bag with $2.4 million? If your fate was in the hands of Cormac McCarthy, you would take the money and find yourself pursued through the Texas borderlands by a psychopathic killer.

From the fatalistic start of McCarthy's ninth novel, No Country for Old Men, the first since his acclaimed Border Trilogy, one senses that everything in this world is predestined, particularly when it comes to life and death.

The doomed man is a Vietnam veteran-cum-mechanic, Llewelyn Moss, who wants the money to start a new life with his wife, Clara Jean.

The killer, Anton Chigurh, packs a cattle gun that bores a two-and-a-half-inch hole into a man’s brains. Chigurh is an eerie reminder of Judge Holden in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (who himself recalls Milton’s Satan, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Melville’s Captain Ahab). He defies any moral code, is the personification of evil. “There’s no one alive on this planet that’s ever had even a cross word with him," one character says of Chigurh. “They’re all dead.”

Yet while the reader extends sympathy to the victim rather than the antagonist, this is mostly instinctive: the sketchy characterisation and flat narrative voice makes the two interchangeable (apart from Chigurh’s occasionally prophetic speech). No Country for Old Mentakes its title from W. B Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, and the old man here is Ed Tom Bell, who became a sheriff after returning from the Second World War decorated with a bronze star. Bell knows that he let his men down, and has been trying to get his spurs on ever since. When he falters in this case, always two steps behind the killer and the mechanic, one can only wonder what is his role in the story? Sheriff Bell seems to be the novel’s conscience, a bridge between the old ways of righteousness (“back then they were rustlin’ cattle”) and the new ways of lawlessness (“now they’re runnin’ dope”). Interspersed with the action are the sheriff’s diary-like musings on the degeneracy of modern society: police officers getting rich off narcotics, nine unsolved homicides a week, youths with no respect for the law.

“It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners,” he says. “Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.” These passages are reminiscent of McCarthy’s early novels, and allow him to stir up mythical themes (societal wars, regeneration through violence), but they slow the suspense of the main story and feel like padding.

Enter Wells, an assassin sent by a drug lord to track down Chigurh, and there are four men running on luck as the story cuts from one gunfight to another. They take as much pride in their weaponry as they do in their boots: “a heavybarreled .270 on a ’98 Mauser action with a laminated stock”, “a twelve gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock”, “a shortbarreled Uzi with a twenty-five round clip”, “a Tec-9 with two extra magazines and a box and a half of shells”.

While the novel sometimes reads like a gun manual, it has all the pulp of a Tarantino flick as McCarthy echoes the chill of violence in chilly language.

The prose is less Faulkner, more Hemingway this time round: rigid and raw, sentences stripped of commas and adjectives; dialogue without quotations; drama glued with the biblical “and”. For example: “He latched the case and fastened the straps and buckled them and rose and shouldered the rifle and then picked up the case and the machinepistol and took his bearings by his shadow and set out.”

McCarthy's novels make no secret of being “man’s fiction”: some female readers have been put off by the bloodshed doled out with masculine bravado.

No Country for Old Men is more of the same, without the descriptive lyricism that has become McCarthy’s badge. In other words, it is a Western thriller with a racy plot and some punchy dialogue, perfect for a lazy Sunday, if one could do with a strong dose of Texas grit. Otherwise, just wait for the film.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
by Cormac McCarthy
Picador £16.99; 310pp
£15.29 (free p&p) 0870 1608080
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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