This is an almost Manichean novel. The author includes an ersatz narrator, Sheriff Bell, whose thoughts are presented in italics. Sheriff Bell is an old-school boy, with old-school values. He doesn’t like hippies, probably dislikes Nietzsche, is wary of people with their hair died green. He’s also sheriff in a Texas border region which is suffering an epidemic of drug-related violence. Sheriff Bell is conservative, presumably Republican. He harks back to a world he and his parents grew up in, where common values of decency were instilled in society. As soon as those values, (which presumably include not dying your hair), were lost, things started to go to hell in a handcart. Sheriff Bell is set up as a sympathetic character in a world of mindless sociopaths. He loves his wife and serves his community. His values go beyond the performative - he knows that a medal is just a piece of metal, and that wealth and consumption are part of the problem.
On the other hand there is the mercurial, charismatic, and sociopathic villain, Chigurh, so brilliantly played in the film by Javier Badem. (So brilliantly that it’s hard to read the novel without thinking of Bardem’s lanky hair and awkward physique.) Chigurh is a monster who kills without mercy or regret, and believes himself to exist on another moral plain altogether.
The complexity of the novel, and McCarthy’s approach, comes from the fact that the dramatic epicentre of the novel, that which propels the action and ensures the reader’s undivided attention, is not the worthy Sheriff Bell, but the unworthy Chigurh. His actions and cod-philosophy drive the narrative and lend the novel its gothic splendour. When he dies, the bottom drops out of the book. It’s a paradox which, for all of McCarthy’s benediction of Bell, feels unresolved. Bell’s goodness functions in response to Chigurh’s evil. They might be two sides of the same coin that the killer spins to decide people’s fates.
Perhaps there’s something about the way in which the USA functions at work here. Just as the myth of the west required the myth of the savage (touched upon in the novel and much of McCarthy’s writing), a myth that was still hyperactive in my youth, contemporary USA needs to construct it’s antithesis courtesy of a ‘savage’ enemy. Be that communism or islam or even, as is the case of Trump and co now, the immigrants, supposedly illegal, who infiltrate the purity of the nation through a porous border. Which brings us back round to Cormac McCarthy. The strength of his writing is contingent on the idea of the other, which lurks across the border, waiting to poison the homespun decency of small-town America.
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