In No Country for Old Men McCarthy abandons the Western, historical genre for a form of storytelling centered on making his tale a reflection of the modern world. On one level it serves as a philosophical meditation on good and evil-as do, for example, the books of the Border Trilogy-but it also features a plot based on the classics of the crime novel genre. Though the novel shares many of the characteristics of McCarthy's earlier works, it also breaks new ground for the author.
No Country for Old Men is a violent book, and McCarthy never shies away from describing murder and mayhem in the most gory detail. Taken from a line in William Butler Yeats's poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” the novel's title refers to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell's feelings about the changing times and what people are willing to do to one another in pursuit of money and power. It details the effects of a drug deal gone bad in 1980 and allows McCarthy to turn his eye toward the drugs, guns, and issues relating to violence and modernity. Like the previous three novels that make up Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy, No Country for Old Men is set along the Texas-Mexico border.
While the book examines the large themes-such as violence and culture clash-that are McCarthy's stock and trade, it uses the basic thriller formula to tell a fast-moving story about an Everyman, a lawman from a different era, and a sociopathic killer. No Country for Old Men (2005) brings Cormac McCarthy's idiosyncratic syntax and spare dialogue to the crime novel genre.
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