Pursuit in the desert

Seven years after the groundbreaking Border trilogy, Cormac McCarthy has returned to that literary landscape he has made his own, the American-Mexican border: a near-fantastic tabula rasa of unmapped and unknowable spaces and histories, populated by people in thrall to geographic and climatic necessity, and for whom both the present and the future represent only a succession of unavoidable challenges; a landscape endlessly redrawn and reshaped in the formulations of new brutalities, new expectations and new desires.

No Country for Old Men is perhaps McCarthy’s most contemporary fiction. And unlike, say, the Border trilogy or Blood Mountain, where experiments with prose and narrative style almost subsumed in places the stories being told, No Country sees a return to the far simpler structures of Child of God and Outer Dark, where the unfolding tension and speed of events engage the reader, and where the prose is paced and tempered accordingly.