A review by annaboudinot
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I first read this book shortly after the movie came out in 2007. The film was directed by the Coen brothers and won Academy awards for best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay. The Coen brothers are those rare filmmakers who understand that the book is always better than the movie: their screenplay follows the novel to a T, only omitting a couple scenes. The dialogue appears in the film exactly as McCarthy wrote it. I started rereading this book in 2024 and quickly remembered why the story had resonated with me so much. The 2005 novel and the 2007 movie were created during the presidency of George W. Bush. Though smart phones didn’t exist then, it was the first time that average Americans could track the every move of their president on the internet, which had only recently become widely accessible. G.W. Bush did a lot of things that were deeply upsetting, including lying about why America needed to invade Iraq, and those years were a sneak preview of the increasing disenfranchisement that the average US citizen would experience at the hands of political families and powerful corporations. In the novel, a small town sheriff who has descended from generations of Texas lawmen takes a special interest in a multiple homicide that occurs when a multimillion dollar drug deal goes bad. He’s close to retirement, and although something tells him that he doesn’t need the added risk and anxiety of going above and beyond after the case falls into federal jurisdiction, he can’t walk away. As he attempts to intervene and keep his local citizens safe from harm, he muses upon the futility of going up against pure evil. I remember a friend and I stumbling out of the theater after seeing No Country for Old Men and not being able to speak for almost an hour. The book has the same impact. It manages to capture, without hitting you over the head with the allegory, the powerlessness you feel when you live in a country that only PRETENDS to be a democracy. 
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