Brooks on Books: No Country for Old Men

I just read the novel "No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy, and while I enjoyed it, I wish I had read it BEFORE seeing the movie. Instead, having seen the Coen Brothers' adaptation a few months ago, I now feel almost like I saw it again, albeit with a lot more words. On one hand, it is amazing to see how much the Coens took straight from the page, but on the other, I feel a lot of the potential vitality of the written word is lost to me because I've seen it so faithfully reproduced on the big screen.

Now, I don't mean this as a knock on anyone associated with the motion picture. Adaptation is not an easy task, and even when you're being so respectful to the source material--using big chunks of verbatim, for example, you're still making choices and exercising creative license. The Coens do this very well. Take casting, for example. It's tempting to think Javier Bardem just read the lines Cormac McCarthy gave sadistic killer Anton Chigurh, but if you read the book, you can appreciate just how much the Oscar winner creates that character on the screen.

The film made such an indelible impression on me that I just can't do the book itself justice by talking only about it. However, I can say that reading Cormac McCarthy is much different than watching the Coen Brothers. If you've never read McCarthy before, you may be in for a rude awakening at the author's style choices.

McCarthy's often blunt, direct dialogue is presented without quotation marks, an annoying hallmark of his writing that creates a bit of a wall for the reader. Even punctuation is often left out of the text. Apostrophes, for example, are exiled from many a paragraph, forcing us to process lots of "donts" and "cants" and such. Perhaps there are legitimate stylistic reasons for these choices, and I pondered what they could be, but ultimately I found them off-putting.

My favorite character in the film is, by a wide margin, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones. As great as Jones is, though--and I can't imagine anyone doing it better--the informal, conversational, but philosophical soliloquies the character delivers play even better on the page. This isn't hard to believe. The character is plain-spoken and comes off as folksy, but what he says is quite important with regards to some of the book's themes, such as the presence of evil in the modern world. He's a literary character with literary thoughts, and his final thoughts give the book a sense of closure that plays far more ambiguously on the screen. Of course, you could argue that ambiguity in itself has its advantages, and many critics and even lowly bloggers like myself would agree with you.

There are a few significant differences in the source material. For example, that encounter Josh Brolin has with a lounging female at the hotel? Well, that detour is totally different in the book. However, those of you expecting "the answers" in here will be frustrated, as McCarthy doesn't spell out much more than the Coens present. You're not gonna pick this up, go, "Aha," and slap your head because it was there in the book all along.

If you can get past the style and put some distance between yourself and the movie, you might check out McCarthy's original version of "No Country for Old Men." It's a harsh but compelling book that provides a compelling story and some harrowing visions of evil in our society. If you have not seen the movie and think it sounds interesting, I strongly recommend you read the book first, THEN rent the DVD. The novel will likely seem much more powerful, and you'll still enjoy the adaptation.