Just finished No Country For Old Men and it, like everything I've read by McCarthy, is brilliant. The storytelling and scope of the Border Trilogy, the shambling beauty of Suttree--in this book McCarthy writes a true page-turner and still manages, somehow, to work his magic for capturing a landscape and its people. Not content with that, he weaves in deep, abiding questions of good, evil, and human nature.
As curious a comparison it may seem, Cujo by Stephen King comes to mind, particularly in the way innocents are swept up in an all-devouring evil. In Cujo, however, the cause of this evil is shrouded, its motives veiled. The result is more akin to Greek tragedy in which fickle gods can be heard laughing backstage. Not so in No Country. God is either absent or "that god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash." Through a forsaken country filled with people that don't know what to believe, the force of evil, embodied in Chigurh, moves unhindered. Indeed, he seems a prophet, full of conviction in his own beliefs, and given to sermons that end in bloodshed.
"I had no say in the matter. Every moment your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning."
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