Texas Pages

Prince of monsters
Even murder doesn't satiate
McCarthy's leading villain in 'No Country'

By BRYAN WOOLLEY
Staff Writer

Twenty years ago, Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian, a
terrifying hymn to violence and death. It was his fifth novel and
his first set in the Texas-Mexico desert borderlands that have been
his literary homeland since. It sold few copies at first, but
critics and academics now acknowledge it as one of the great
American novels and name Mr. McCarthy with the same reverence as
Melville and Faulkner.

The central figure in Blood Meridian is Judge Holden, a 7-foot-tall
hairless albino who never sleeps, joyfully rapes and murders little
boys and girls, dances and fiddles with unlikely grace and claims
he will never die. He's the embodiment of war and death, perhaps a
demon or the devil himself.

Now in No Country for Old Men, Mr. McCarthy gives us another such
villain. He's Anton Chiguhr, a man of unknown origin, a murderer of
brilliant mind and dedicated skill, eyes as "blue as lapis. At once
glistening and opaque. Like wet stones," who lives by a twisted
justice code of his own invention.

Chiguhr lacks Judge Holden's supernatural aura because he inhabits
a different kind of novel. But on the gut level he's more
terrifying than Holden because he's closer in time, part of our
familiar world, somebody who might be sitting at the next table at
Denny's.

Blood Meridian is the story of a band of American cutthroats hired
by a Mexican state to kill and scalp Indians for a fee. Such an
expedition really happened in the borderlands in 1849-50, and many
of Mr. McCarthy's characters - including Judge Holden - bear
historical names. But the beauty of Mr. McCarthy's style, the
majesty of his archaic language, his layering of themes and symbols
and the horrible power of his characters elevate Blood Meridian
above mere history, even mere fiction, into an epic of doom.

No Country for Old Men is a smaller and more modern story. It's set
in 1980 in the country between Del Rio and the Big Bend, the vast
and dangerous desert that travelers along I-10 and I-20 see through
their windshields while zooming past Odessa, Fort Stockton, Sonora,
Sheffield, Dryden or Balmorhea.

To a stranger's eyes, that country seems empty and desolate. But it
always has been the business place of thieves, bandits and
smugglers of cattle, guns, whiskey or anything else that's illegal
and desired on one side of the Rio Grande or the other.

Today the big business is drugs. And anyone reading the news from
Nuevo Laredo and Juárez these days knows the drug traffickers are
not like the contrabandos of the past.

"I ain't sure we've seen these people before," says the book's Ed
Tom Bell, who has served Terrell County, Texas, as sheriff for more
than 30 years. "I don't know what to do about em even. If you
killed em all they'd have to build a annex on to hell."

From his office in tiny Sanderson, the sheriff sees his isolated
world and its values convulsing. He remembers a time when the big
problems in the schools were talking in class, running in the
hallways and chewing gum. Now they're rape, arson, murder, drugs
and suicide.

And he sees emerging a new kind of criminal, a monster created by
and for the narcotics trade. He's a killer devoid of mercy or
conscience or soul, driven by greed and the joy he derives from the
power to murder. The monster commands corrupt policemen and
soldiers and politicians. A constant and infinite flow of dope
customers' cash nourishes him.

"I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to
think up something that would just bring the human race to its
knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics," the
sheriff says. "Maybe he did."

The epitome of the new criminal breed is Chiguhr, prince of
monsters, the coldest and cruelest. He is intelligent, resourceful,
solitary, relentless and acknowledges no master. The sheriff has
never seen him. He doesn't know his name. But he knows his work and
feels his presence.

In the story's beginning, Llewelyn Moss, a young Sanderson welder,
is hunting antelope near the Rio Grande. Through binoculars he
spots three bullet-riddled vehicles in the desert and several dead
men and a dead dog on the ground. He investigates and discovers one
of the vehicles is loaded with heroin. Some distance away, he finds
another dead man and a briefcase containing $2.4 million.

Moss takes the briefcase and runs. Although he knows his action
almost certainly will bring catastrophe upon him and his family, he
can't resist the money's lure.

The story immediately becomes a taut thriller detailing Moss'
hectic efforts to escape with the cash and protect his wife. He's
pursued north and south of the river, east and west along the West
Texas interstates, by the hit men of rival Mexican cartels, a
former U.S. Special Forces officer who's now in a drug lord's hire,
and Chiguhr, far deadlier than the rest.

Trying to save the young couple from Moss' folly, Sheriff Bell
pursues them, too, through broad swatches of bullet-riddled motels,
burned automobiles, gunshot bodies - more than a dozen of them
eventually - marinating in puddles of blood.

Mr. McCarthy's story is so exquisitely harrowing that the reader
can forget to breathe. But it's Sheriff Bell's private meditations
interspersed between the chapters that give it its heft and soul.
He's an aging warrior carrying an ancient guilt of his own, but
still firm in his knowledge of right and wrong and his devotion to
duty and domestic love.

Whenever you talk to people these days about right and wrong, Bell
says, "they're liable to smile at you. But I never had a lot of
doubts about things like that. ... I hope I never do."

He belongs to the old order of Texas morality. He sees that order
disappearing. "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners,"
he says. "Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty
much in sight."

Anton Chiguhr and his clients and rivals and most of his victims
are the harbingers of the new age of chaos and brutality. The old
sheriff suspects he can't beat them. He wonders whether he can even
fight them.

For 20 years, some who have tried to read Blood Meridian are so
repulsed by its ceaseless rape, murder, torture and mayhem that
they can't continue. Others become so enthralled in its bloody
coils that they can't lay it aside.

No Country for Old Men is nearly as violent and pessimistic as that
masterpiece. But readers aren't likely to be so shocked as they
were those two decades ago. We've grown more comfortable with evil.

ALL ABOUT CORMAC

Cormac McCarthy (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95) Cormac McCarthy, whose
recent novels have focused on Texas, is widely regarded as one of
the most important living American writers. And No Country for Old
Men, being released Tuesday, is the latest in a series of triumphs.

Born: Providence, R.I., 1933.

Background: Family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., in 1937. The son of
an attorney, he attended the University of Tennessee in the early
1950s but never graduated. When he was in his 30s and 40s, he lived
in various places, including New Orleans, the island of Ibiza and
in and around Knoxville.

Key moment: In 1981, Saul Bellow, Shelby Foote and others
recommended him for a MacArthur Fellowship, and he received
$236,000. He left for the Southwest, specifically El Paso, and
spent the next five years researching and writing Blood Meridian.
For the past few years, he has been living in the Tesuque section
of Santa Fe, N.M.

Family: Married to Jennifer Winkley. They have a 6-year-old son,
John. Two earlier marriages ended in divorce.

Key writings: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child
of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985) and The Border
Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses,1992; The Crossing,1994; Cities of
the Plain, 1998).

Incidentally: There's a factual error in the first line of No
Country for Old Men. Mr. McCarthy refers to a Texas execution in a
gas chamber, but the state has never used that method.

-- Charles Ealy