No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

    This is a very dark book. I remember seeing No Country for Old Men when I was a kid, probably not long after it came out, and that Javier Bardem was terrifying as Anton Chigurh. I vividly remembered the first coin flip scene, and the scenes with Josh Brolin first out hunting and discovering the drug deal gone bad, as well as the first encounter between Chigurh and Moss.

    Reading the book, I think a few different motifs/themes are worth writing about. First, the news. Lots of different characters talk about how they can't watch the news anymore. It's part of a bigger theme about societal decline. It feels very different, tonally, from All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing that way, or at least different from my memory of those books. While all three portray Mexico as a wasteland forgotten by time, where it's just full of poverty and savagery, No Country was the first McCarthy book I read that romanticized the past. The book was written later, and is set later in time. McCarthy was older when he wrote it. But a big part of it is that between the 1940s and 1980s, the gap between All the Pretty Horses and No Country, drugs swept across America. At the same time, TV news brought stories of crime and death into peoples' homes every night.

    Another theme was aging and death. While the other McCarthy books featured young protagonists, neither Llewellyn Moss, nor Sheriff Bell, is young. Both are old, and both saw war in their younger days. The only real young characters are Carla Jean and the hitchhiker that Moss picks up towards the end. Everyone else is older. Lots of them are out of place in the world from being old, and being used to an easier time, with harder men. Sheriff Bell remembers how two generations before his, the men were much tougher from fighting Indians, and he doubts whether he is of their stock, or if he fits in better with new men, who are weaker. There's also a couple times where characters observe patterns in rocks chiseled by Native Americans and think about how someone could be so attached to the land to leave something there for eternity, with faith that nothing would ever change.

    Anton Chigurh is an appalling character. His cold brutality, from betting lives on a coin flip to killing people with a tool for killing cattle, contrasts with Sheriff Bell and Llewellyn Moss' sentimentality. McCarthy tells you what he thinks about sentimentality. Basically every character that does something nice is punished for it. When Moss brings water to a dying man, he's discovered by the cartel. When he spares Chigurh, he gets chased by him. When he tried to leave the money he found to Carla Jean, he dooms her. He picked up a hitchhiker, and died because Chigurh took her captive as a way to him. Meanwhile, Chigurh places to value on any life. He just flips a coin.