Moralizing mars Cormac McCarthy’s ‘No Country’

Not since Ernest Hemingway has there been a writer with so distinctive and recognizable a style as Cormac McCarthy. His virtuosity shines from every page.

If a McCarthy novel were presented to a discerning reader without revealing the writer’s name, the reader would make the correct identification almost every time.

Like Hemingway, McCarthy has reduced his prose to sparse essentials. In “No Country for Old Men” – the title taken from a poem by William Butler Yeats – one can read on for pages without finding an adjective.

And like Hemingway, McCarthy chooses to write about men of action, good and bad. (The word “men” is meant literally; women play a very slight role in McCarthy’s world, and in this new novel, there is only one woman, who doesn’t fare well, involved in the main plot.)

While this is McCarthy’s ninth novel, his crowning achievement is his so-called Border Trilogy: “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing” and “Cities of the Plain.” These are tough tales about tough people, men on a mission who are not afraid to die in the process and bad men opposing them who are quite as brave and quite as determined as the protagonists.

“No Country for Old Men” is an enormously impressive book in many respects. There are pages of dialogue in which we can only sit and marvel at the power and skill of this most unusual writer.

Still, in the end, it disappoints, largely because of some very un-McCarthy-like moralizing, out loud and at length. As a result, it is good but not as good as his most avid admirers might hope.

In “No Country,” we are once again in McCarthy Country, the border land that separates Texas and Mexico.

The story appears to be set in the 1980s.

Llewelyn Moss, a 36-year-old welder and Vietnam veteran, ventures out on a hunt for antelopes. Instead, he finds a countryside littered with human corpses, and he also finds some $2.5 million in drug money.

Foolishly, Moss takes the money and heads home. Even more foolishly, he returns to the scene.

By this time, several gangs have noticed what is going on, and Moss is fleeing for his life while also endangering the life of his teenage wife, Carla Jean.

McCarthy’s stories usually contain public killings, but this one is an absolute blood bath. One of the characters is unsure of the actual number of corpses but places it around nine or 10. That is before the last group of murders, which is considerable.

The author takes the bold step of making his central character – and the one who is in some ways the most admirable – a psychopathic killer named Anton Chigurh. He is responsible for many of the deaths in the story.

Even so, he is a brave man who has a strange code of honor and sticks to it, even when it puts his life at risk. Several other desperadoes try to do Chigurh in, but he is too tough and too smart.

All this is marred, however, by a series of segments expressing the views of the elderly lawman investigating the murders, known to us only as Sheriff Bell. The sheriff believes the world is on a downward path, and it sounds very much as if McCarthy agrees with him.

Here are a few samples of Bell’s homespun philosophy:

“I read the papers ever mornin. Mostly I suppose just to try and figure out what might be headed this way. … My wife won’t read the papers no more. She’s probably right. She generally is.”

And: “Because a lot of the time when ever 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.”

And, on the aftereffects of the Vietnam War: “A lot of them boys that come back, they’re still havin’ problems. I thought it was because they didn’t have the country behind them. But I think it might be worse than that even. The country they did have was in pieces. It still is.”

Not that there is necessarily anything wrong about expressing such sentiments.

It’s just that McCarthy has always been a writer who let his stories speak for themselves and didn’t tack on philosophic mutterings. Departing from that model slightly mars what is otherwise a very fine work.