No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
Picador, HK$132
No Country for Old Men has been given a second wind thanks to its highly praised film adaptation by the Coen brothers, which stars Tommy Lee Jones. Part existential thriller and part contemporary western, the novel opens in the desert landscape of a gloriously realised Rio Grande. Cormac McCarthy begins the novel with a bang: Llewlyn Moss is out hunting when he happens upon a drug deal gone wrong. Lying among a caravan of trucks are dead and dying people, an enormous consignment of heroin and (so Moss reckons) US$2.4 million in cash. Having stolen the money, Moss recklessly returns to the scene of the crime, where he is spotted and forced to run for his life. 'If you knew there was somebody out here afoot that had two million dollars of your money, at what point would you quit lookin' for em? That's right. There ain't no such point,' we are informed. This extraordinary novel shows McCarthy (who won last year's Pulitzer Prize for The Road) at the height of his powers. The plot races like a terrified pulse and the prose is full of terse beauty and grim one-liners: 'There is no description of a fool that you fail to satisfy,' Moss neatly reasons.
