Book Review: No Country for Old Men
This book has been in my Kindle wishlist for a while after I watched the movie for like the third time maybe. Cormac McCarthy’s books are considered as modern classic without a doubt, but I’m just in that age group where the movie came first before the read. So I couldn’t help myself but to compare the book with Coen brothers’ masterful adaptation of it. The book surprisingly adds another dimension to the movie with parts and dialogues that are omitted in the film. These additional parts would cut through deep into the reality where the film could not reach.
Simplicity is the nature of this book. In Coen brothers’ adaptation, you cannot hear any background noise except in perhaps one scene. Just like in photography where a black & white film would highlight the object and composition, a movie without any noise would make you focus on the dialogue and the visuals. McCarthy achieves the same effect by not wasting any words. Because the dialogues are so simple, readers will become attentive to each page.
I’m not sure why I did this but I think I wanted to see if I could extricate myself by an act of will. Because I believe that one can. That such a thing is possible. But it was a foolish thing to do. A vain thing to do. Do you understand?
Do I understand?
Yes.
Do you have any notion of how gaddamned crazy you are?
The nature of this conversation?
The nature of you.
The meaning behind the story, however, is not so obvious. In the film, as Anton Chigurh’s coin toss dictated life and death, the society seemed to be dictated by simple probabilities and human ideals, such as the morality and ethics, had no place in it. Gruesome violence became more prevalent, making the old men wonder what went wrong from the beginning. In the book, the striking moment comes when Sheriff Ed Tob Bell confesses his cowardice during the service in World War II and how he was decorated for it. This experience made him wise but somewhat a lost patriarch in the society, where he has to spiritually rely on his wife. He can do nothing but to watch the next generation, who similarly goes through the Vietnam War, fall into further violence and intoxication.
What the book is ultimately telling us is that the irrational and outrageous behaviors by the younger generation in our society can be traced back to the decisions we made in the past. In every generation, there is the old who points a finger at the young for the loss of virtue and decency, but it is the outcome of all the decisions made by the previous generations. Just like the lost generation of post-WWII, the current generation becomes lost by the mistakes of their fathers. Just as Llewelyn Moss had to fight for himself, there is no other choice for the younger generation but to look out for themselves.
I had no say in the matter. Every moment in 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 believe 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.
Living in 2016, the revelation from this book is especially disconcerting when we are seeing more gun violence in schools, the veterans returning from the Middle East, more than 300 buried under the sea without a rescue… In each of these moments, we had a choice that went wasted and an outcome that will reverberate throughout the generation. Without the will to extricate ourselves from this vicious cycle, we will walk the same path that was visible from the very beginning.
