But only after two more men are murdered does a victim's burning car lead Sheriff Bell to the carnage out in the desert, and he soon realizes how desperately Moss and his young wife need protection. Packing the money out, he knows, will change everything. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, instead finds men shot dead, a load of heroin, and more than $2 million in cash. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. ROBERT SIEGEL (Host): This is NPR, National Public Radio.Ĭopyright © 2005 NPR. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

NORRIS: The book is 'No Country for Old Men' by Cormac McCarthy. `Hell is other people,' Jean-Paul Sartre had a character announce in his play 'No Exit.' When you hear Sheriff Bell meditate on his own life, you realize that heaven is other people, too. With this new book he's broadened his vision. McCarthy in his previous blood-steeped books seemed himself to follow no rule but tell a good story, making beautiful prose however violent and terrifying.

In the days, weeks and months that follow, murder leads to murder, the innocent pulled in along with the more than guilty and many in between. Within a page, Chigurh runs loose in the world once again. Looming large in the first scene is a murderous sociopath named Anton Chigurh, a killer for hire without a conscience, who's turned himself in to a sheriff's department just to see if he can make his escape. Like the novels in the border trilogy, this story straddles the Texas-Mexico line and its still extraordinary, beautiful desert as one of McCarthy's characters, a meditative sheriff named Bell, sees it: `The raw rock mountain, shadowed in the late sun, and to the east the shimmering abscissa of the desert plains under a sky where rain curtains hung dark as soot all along the quadrant.'īut the meditative opening sequence from the point of view of Sheriff Bell hints more at hopelessness than hope. Alan Cheuse has a review of 'No Country for Old Men.' Writer Cormac McCarthy has a new book out, the first since the completion of his border trilogy.

No country for old men book pages