The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Cormac McCarthy · a novel in thirteen numbered chapters, each opened by a monologue in italics · Alfred A. Knopf, 2005 · scored on McCarthy’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The crime chase turned into an elegy; thriller, western and a sheriff’s memoir in alternating voices
Mythos
Death as a hired man who cannot be bought and leaves a life to a coin; the hunter who takes what was not his and is hunted for it; the father who rides ahead carrying fire into the dark
Phase
The border country in 1980, from the finding of the money in the desert through the chase, the death at El Paso and the death of the hunted man’s wife, to the sheriff’s retirement, his visit to his uncle and his dreams of his father
Presentation
Fiction; thirteen numbered chapters, each opening with a first-person monologue in italics by the sheriff, the rest in the third person moving among the hunted man, the killer, the second hunter and the sheriff; dialogue without quotation marks, most contractions without apostrophes
Register
From the plain procedural sentence of the chase and the killer’s formal, slightly wrong speech to the sheriff’s idiom, held in its own grammar, and the dream of the last page
Scale
Four men, two marriages and one pursuit across one region in one year, with two wars and the elders of the country behind them
Governing Proposition
A welder and veteran of Vietnam, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande in 1980, finds the aftermath of a drug deal gone to slaughter and a case of some two million dollars, and takes it; a hired killer who decides by a coin tracks him across the border country, and a sheriff who opens every chapter in his own voice follows them both and arrives each time after the fact. The hunted man is killed offstage, the killer walks away, and the sheriff retires and confesses an old failure of his own. The wager of the novel is that a crime chase told in plain procedure, set against an old man’s lament, can show a man meeting what he cannot meet, and finding that the failure was in him before it was in the times.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Each of the novel’s thirteen numbered chapters opens in italics, in the first person, with a sheriff talking. He is Ed Tom Bell, sheriff of Terrell County, Texas, and the year is 1980. The voice is an old man’s, held in its own grammar and idiom, reporting and lamenting. Then the italics end and the chapter goes on in the third person, moving among other men, Llewelyn Moss, Anton Chigurh, Carson Wells, and Bell himself seen from outside. The two modes alternate to the end. The title comes from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “That is no country for old men”.
Moss is a welder and a veteran of Vietnam. Hunting antelope in the desert near the Rio Grande, he comes on the aftermath of a drug deal gone to slaughter, and a case holding some two million dollars. He takes it. The first chapter sets every motion that follows, and the narration gives the finding as it gives everything in the chase: in plain procedure, sentence after sentence, without comment. There are no quotation marks; speech is carried by “he said” and by the break of the line, and most contractions drop their apostrophes.
That night Moss goes back to the killing ground with water for the dying man he found there. The decency is what dooms him. He is hunted across the dark by a truck, and from then on he is pursued. The arrangement of the book is already plain: the chase moves by consequence and knows nothing of meaning, and the sheriff’s voice, opening each chapter, knows only meaning and comes after the consequence. Bell is one scene behind from the start.
Movement II
Chigurh is a hired killer. He carries a captive-bolt cattle gun and a silenced shotgun, and he tracks Moss by a transponder hidden in the case. At a gas station he asks the proprietor to call a coin toss, and the man does not know what he is wagering. “Call it.” The room is plain and the talk is plain, and the book reaches its summit of cold terror in a conversation about a coin, with a life decided on a word the man did not know he was saying.
Chigurh cannot be bought and cannot be reasoned with. His speech is formal, unidiomatic, slightly wrong, and the wrongness is the man. He holds that the coin is not chance but the shape of a life’s path arriving at that moment, and he keeps his word even to the dead. He is death and fate in the book, and he is also a body: he bleeds, he steals drugs from a pharmacy, he cleans his own wound. The book makes him particular so that he cannot be only a symbol.
The chase is written as procedure, and its devices are each used and paid: the transponder, the motel vents unscrewed, the case hidden in the duct. How a gun is cleaned and a wound dressed are given with an attention that carries the suspense by itself. The backers of the deal hire a second hunter, Carson Wells, a professional, and Chigurh kills him. Wells’s chapters are the most conventional in the book; they show the rule of Chigurh demonstrated on a man who knew the trade.
Movement III
In the hotel at Eagle Pass Chigurh is in the corridor and Moss waits in the dark with the shotgun. Moss is wounded. At dawn he crosses the bridge into Piedras Negras, and in Mexico he recovers. These are heights of the thriller kind, held in exact prose, and the book reaches them often; between them the chase is efficient rather than elevated, and the middle chapters run on procedure.
Between the scenes of the chase the sheriff talks. His sections run to a jeremiad: a lament for manners, for the young, for a country he believes drugs and money have unmade, and the story of a woman at a conference who stands in his telling for the times. The book needs the lament in kind, and does not need all of it. Bell asserts more than the chase shows. In the early chapters his italic openings are report more than confession, and what they are evading is not yet plain.
Moss has a young wife, Carla Jean, and Bell has his, Loretta; Carla Jean’s mother is with her daughter. The marriages are drawn lightly, and two wars stand behind the men, Bell’s in Europe and Moss’s in Vietnam, as the measure of their generations. Near the end of his road Moss takes up a hitchhiking girl. She is there to show his decency and to set the scene at the motel, and she is thinner in necessity than she is in pathos.
Movement IV
Moss is killed at a motel in El Paso by Mexican gunmen, a little past two thirds of the way through the book. The death happens offstage. It is reported after the fact, and Bell arrives after it, at a motel already taped off. The reader learns of it as Bell learns of it, and the form has made him stand where the sheriff has stood all along.
This is the book’s swerve. The hero of the chase dies unseen with much of the book still to run; the killer is not caught; the sheriff never meets him in any decisive way. A thriller is turned into an elegy by the refusal of its climax, and the refusal is a wager against the reader’s investment. It is set up, since Bell has been behind from the first chapter and the girl at the motel is the occasion; and it is paid, since from here the book becomes Bell’s.
Chigurh kills Carla Jean, Moss’s young wife, after a coin toss. The scene at the gas station has given the coin its ground, and the same coin that was turned on a stranger early in the book returns at the end of her life. Then Chigurh is injured in a car crash and walks away from it with a bone through his arm. The killer leaves the book wounded and unpunished, and the chase ends without anyone having caught anyone.
Movement V
Bell retires. He visits his uncle Ellis and confesses to him a failure in the war: he left his position, and men died. The confession turns the book. Every lament before it is reread as the voice of a man who never matched his own measure, and his nostalgia, which has been the book’s voice, becomes its object too. The failure he has been lamenting in the times was his before it was theirs.
The last chapter is given over to Bell entirely, which is how the book reveals that his story was its subject all along. His italic openings have moved from report toward confession. The book has held two laws side by side, the killer’s word kept and the path completed, and the sheriff’s acceptance of what he cannot meet, and they are one law, consequence, seen from its worst man and from its best.
The book ends on two dreams of Bell’s dead father. In the second the father rides ahead into the dark and the cold, “carryin fire in a horn”, going before to make a light for the one who follows. Then the last words: “And then I woke up.” The image of the elder carrying fire, which The Road would take up the next year, lifts the whole book by a register at its close.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book is lean. Moss’s finding of the money in the first chapter sets every motion that follows, and the devices of the chase are each used and paid: the transponder in the case, the motel vents, the case hidden in the duct. Remove Chigurh’s scene at the gas station and the coin, and Carla Jean’s death has no ground; remove Bell’s monologues and the book is a chase with no one to measure it. Carson Wells is required, the rule of Chigurh shown on a professional, though his chapters are the most conventional in the book. What holds the axis is quantity, not kind: Bell’s lament is needed, but it runs longer than the need, and the hitchhiking girl Moss takes up near the end is thinner in necessity than in pathos, there to show his decency and to set the scene at the motel.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a man who has built his life on the belief that the law and his own courage can meet what comes finds that what has come answers to neither, and that the failure was in him before it was in the times. The second half is the book’s real finding, and it is withheld to the end, when Bell tells his uncle Ellis that in the war he left his position and men died. The confession turns every lament before it into the voice of a man who never matched his own measure. Beside it, Chigurh’s logic discloses the cost of a fatalism with no mercy in it. Held below the bar because a large share of what the book carries is mood and lament, and the social claim, that drugs and money have unmade the border’s moral order, is asserted by Bell more than shown. The book knows this; knowing it does not make the claim truer.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Elevation here is dread, and it comes often. At the gas station a proprietor is asked to call a coin toss whose stakes he does not know, “Call it”, and a plain room becomes a summit of cold terror. Moss goes back to the killing ground at night with water for a dying man and is hunted across the dark by a truck. In the hotel at Eagle Pass Chigurh is in the corridor and Moss waits in the dark with the shotgun; at dawn Moss crosses the bridge into Piedras Negras wounded. The warm summit is the last page, Bell’s dream of his father riding ahead “carryin fire in a horn” into the dark and the cold, and it lifts the whole book by a register. Held at 8.2 because between the summits the chase is efficient rather than elevated, and the middle chapters run on procedure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built, in one figure above all. Chigurh bears the book as death and as fate: he cannot be bought or reasoned with, keeps his word to the dead, and leaves a choice to a coin that he holds is not chance but the shape of a life’s path arriving at that moment. The book will not let him be only a symbol. He bleeds, steals drugs from a pharmacy, cleans his own wound, and walks away from a car crash with a bone through his arm. The second built myth is the father carrying fire, the elder going before into the dark to make a light. The title from Yeats sets the frame, the old men whose country this is not, and Moss is the hunter who takes what was not his and is hunted for it, a plain archetype carried without allusion. Held below the bar because the archetypal weight rests on Chigurh and the final dream, and Bell’s lament, the other half of the book, is more elegy than myth.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the crime thriller and the western, and McCarthy’s own high style, the biblical periods of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy. The swerve is double. Within the genre, the hero of the chase is killed offstage and reported after the fact, with much of the book still to run; the killer is not caught; the sheriff never meets him in any decisive way, and retires. The book turns a thriller into an elegy by refusing it its climax, and the alternation with the monologues makes the chase a matter for an old man’s conscience. Within the author, the turn is toward a stripped, procedural prose. The offstage death is a wager against the reader’s investment, and a real one. Held at 8.1 because the genre itself was a proven path, and the refused climax has precedents in the crime novel and in film.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The two voices are the argument. The third-person chase knows nothing of meaning and moves by consequence; the first-person monologue knows only meaning and arrives after every consequence. Told as a chase alone, the book is a thriller whose hero dies; told as Bell’s memoir alone, it is a lament. Together they show a man always one scene behind, and the form puts the reader where Bell stands: Moss’s death is learned as Bell learns it, at a motel already taped off. The italic openings move from report toward confession, and the last chapter gives the book over to Bell entirely, which is how it reveals that his story was the subject all along. Held below the top because the chase sections, taken alone, are not formally unusual, and the alternation is regular rather than progressive until the end.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and twenty-one years supply little of it; return to the book is hard to separate from return to the film made of it. What the book yields on return is real: the coin and Chigurh’s argument about the path that led to it; Bell’s confession to Ellis, which rereads every earlier monologue as evasion; the two dreams of the father; and the question whether Bell’s lament is the book’s view or its object. These are questions a reader carries back, and they are not settled. What holds the axis below the eights is the plot, which yields little on a second reading, and a surface designed to be grasped at once.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the American novel of the early twenty-first century. The intrinsic force is moderate: a major literary novelist took the crime chase on its own terms and bent it into elegy, and the refusal of the genre’s ending is real pressure on the genre. It is not a reorganisation of what the novel can do, and within McCarthy’s own work it is a narrowing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide in fame, and wide largely through the Coen brothers’ film of 2007, so that a good part of the reach is another work’s. The book is significant in its field, but the field is not unthinkable without it, and no influence on later fiction is credited here beyond what can be shown.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-one years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, in print continuously, translated widely and taught. Presence is wide, but a large part of it is the film’s: readers come to the book through the Coens, and fame lent by an adaptation is presence, not proof. The surface is fixed in part to its moment, the border of 1980 and the drug wars as seen from 2005, and Bell’s lament for the young, though the core of the book, a man meeting what he cannot meet, has no date. The axis stands a tenth below the widest mark for its span because the presence is borrowed in part from another work, and two decades demonstrate far less than the centuries behind the summit.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The command is exact and load-bearing. The procedural sentences of the chase, how a gun is cleaned, how a wound is dressed, how a motel vent is unscrewed, carry suspense by attention alone. The dialogue, without quotation marks and with the apostrophes dropped from “cant” and “dont”, moves at the speed of speech and keeps its menace. Chigurh’s speech is formal, unidiomatic and slightly wrong, and the wrongness is the character. Bell’s monologues hold one voice in its own grammar and idiom across thirteen sections without slipping into pastiche, and the structure is cut with a screenwriter’s economy. Charged: the stripped register forgoes the range the author had shown elsewhere, and a few of Bell’s sections thin into commonplace.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One physics governs the whole: consequence, which no one escapes and no one controls, and which arrives whether or not anyone is there to see it. Take the two most distant elements, the coin toss at the gas station and Bell’s dream of his father. Both are about what comes and who goes before it. Chigurh’s law, the word kept and the path completed, is the book’s law stated by its worst man, and Bell at the end accepts the same law as its best. The range is a chase and a lament, wide in tone, and the book never contradicts itself. Charged: narrowness is not coherence, and the coherence here is won partly by narrowness, one region, one year, one pattern of pursuit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held: the law and its office; two marriages, Bell and Loretta, Moss and Carla Jean, with Carla Jean’s mother beside them; two wars, Bell’s in Europe and Moss’s in Vietnam, as the measure of the generations; the border economy of drugs and money; a regional history in Bell’s memory of his elders; and the sacred, faintly, in Bell’s want of God and in his father’s fire. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through Bell’s reckoning. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the drawing of the world, tight around a single pursuit, with labour and community only sketched and the sacred a want more than a presence.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.4. A prose whose procedural sentences carry suspense by attention alone, with a killer’s speech whose wrongness is the character and a sheriff’s idiom held across thirteen sections; a myth built on a killer who leaves a life to a coin and on a father who carries fire into the dark; a form of two voices that puts the reader one scene behind, where the sheriff stands; and one law of consequence governing everything from the gas station to the last dream.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: a world drawn tight around a single pursuit, with labour and community sketched and the sacred a want more than a presence. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, a real pressure on the crime genre that is not a reorganisation of the novel and whose reach runs largely through the film, and The Bottomless Well at 7.8, where twenty-one years show little and the plot yields little on return.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.6, The Living Form at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Imperishable at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 8.1, The Swerve at 8.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: the lowest of the axes it governs is Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, against 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, published by Alfred A. Knopf in July 2005: his ninth novel, after the Border Trilogy (1992 to 1998) and before The Road (2006). It is scored as one novel in thirteen numbered chapters, as first published, each chapter opening with the sheriff’s monologue in italics, which is part of the work. The Coen brothers’ film of 2007 is a separate work with its own page; it is not part of this one, and it neither caps nor lends to the novel. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the line of Yeats that gives the title, “Call it”, “carryin fire in a horn” and “And then I woke up”. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page count and length of the first edition, the history of the material before it became a novel, the exact words of the sheriff’s opening, of Chigurh’s argument about the rule and the path, and of Ellis to Bell, the detail of Bell’s war, and the reception of the book by its first critics, are not given. Citations are by episode.