# No Country for Old Men (novel)

No Country for Old Men is a 2005 novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, who had originally written the story as a screenplay. The story occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country. Owing to its origins as a screenplay, the novel has a simple writing style that differs from McCarthy's earlier novels. The book was adapted into a 2007 Coen brothers film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

## Title

The title of the novel comes from the first line of the 1926 poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by W. B. Yeats.

## Plot

The plot follows the paths of the three characters set in motion by events related to a drug deal gone bad near the Mexican–American border in Terrell County in Texas.
Llewelyn Moss stumbles across the aftermath of a drug deal gone awry that has left all but one dead. That man, barely alive, asks for water. Moss responds that he does not have any, then while searching for other survivors, finds a body some distance off with a satchel containing $2.4 million in cash. He takes the money and returns home, but due to guilt, he returns to the scene with a jug of water. He finds another truck is there waiting. He tries to run, which sparks a chase through a valley. This is the beginning of a hunt for Moss that stretches for most of the novel. Moss sends his wife, Carla Jean, to her grandmother in Texas, while he leaves his home with the money.
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell investigates the crime while trying to protect Moss and his wife, with the aid of other law enforcement agents. Bell is haunted by his actions in the Second World War, for which he received a Bronze Star. Bell has spent most of his life attempting to make up for an incident when he was a 21-year-old soldier. He makes it his quest to resolve the case and save Moss. Complicating things is the arrival of Anton Chigurh. Chigurh is a killer whose weapons of choice are a bolt gun and a pistol. Bounty hunter Carson Wells is also on the trail of the money. Moss, wounded in a firefight with Chigurh, recovers at a hospital while Chigurh patches himself up in a room with supplies taken from a drugstore. Moss is approached by Wells, who offers to give him protection in exchange for the satchel and tells him his location and number.
Chigurh finds Wells and murders him just as Moss calls to negotiate the exchange of money. Chigurh tells Moss that he will kill Carla Jean unless he hands over the satchel. Moss remains defiant and calls Carla Jean and tells her that he will meet up with her at a motel in El Paso. Carla Jean decides to inform Sheriff Bell about the meeting and its location. This call is traced and provides Moss' location to some of his hunters, who kill him but fail to find the money. Sheriff Bell goes to the hospital to identify Moss' body. Chigurh arrives at the scene and retrieves the satchel hidden in an air duct in Moss' room. He returns it to his client and later travels to Carla Jean's house. She pleads for her life and he offers her to flip a coin to decide her fate, but she refuses. Finally she chooses heads, and the coin turns out to be tails, and Chigurh kills her. When leaving the house, Chigurh is hit by a car, which leaves him injured. He limps off down the road.
Bell decides to retire and drives away from the courthouse feeling overmatched and defeated. Bell describes two dreams he experienced after his father died. The first is him meeting his father in town and borrowing some money from him. The second consists of Bell riding his horse through a pass in the mountains. He could see his father up ahead of him carrying a horn lit with fire, and he knew that his father would ride on through the pass and fix a fire out in the dark and cold and that it would be waiting for him when he arrived. He then woke up.

## Reception

The early and late critical reception of the novel was mixed. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 66 out of 100, based on twenty-nine reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on ten critic reviews, with five being "rave", one "positive", three "mixed", and one "pan". The Bookseller reported on reviews from several publications with a rating scale for the novel out of "Top form", "Flawed but worth a read", and "Disappointing": Sunday Times and Financial Times reviews under "Top form" and Independent, Observer, and Times reviews under "Flawed but worth a read". On Bookmarks, September/October 2005 issue, the book received 3.5 out of 5 stars based on critic reviews, with the critical summary saying, "Most critics praised McCarthy’s clean, simple prose, though a few thought it too spare for such a graceful stylist".
William J. Cobb, in a review published in the Houston Chronicle (July 15, 2005), characterized McCarthy as "our greatest living writer" and describes the book as "a heated story that brands the reader's mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames". In the July 24, 2005, issue of The New York Times Book Review, the critic and fiction writer Walter Kirn suggests that the novel's plot is "sinister high hokum", but writes admiringly of the prose, describing the author as "a whiz with the joystick, a master-level gamer who changes screens and situations every few pages".
In contrast, literary critic Harold Bloom did not count himself among the admirers of No Country for Old Men, stating that it lacked the quality of McCarthy's best works, particularly Blood Meridian, and compared it to William Faulkner's A Fable. When comparing the lack of "moral argument" in Blood Meridian to the heightened morality present in No Country for Old Men, Bloom stated that the "apocalyptic moral judgments" made in No Country for Old Men represented "a sort of falling away on McCarthy's part". Furthermore, McCarthy received criticism for the presence of Mexican "drug-related" violence, while lacking the presence of a Mexican character.
The novel has received a significant amount of critical attention, for example, Lynnea Chapman King, Rick Wallach and Jim Welsh's edited collection No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film or Raymond Malewitz's "Anything Can Be an Instrument: Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men."

## Film adaptation

In 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen adapted the book into a film, also titled No Country for Old Men, which was met with critical acclaim and box office success. On January 27, 2008, the film won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. On February 24, 2008, it won four Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (Joel and Ethan Coen), Best Adapted Screenplay (Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh).