Reviews

'A mesmerizing modern day western...' - Publishers Weekly; 'A profoundly disturbing and gorgeously rendered novel...' - New York Times; 'Cormac McCarthy is now the greatest American novelist' - The Times 'This week I travelled hopefully through Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. Both made excellent audiobook journeys, possibly the better for being abridged. Like James Joyce, McCarthy is best appreciated when heard aloud rather than merely read, and the narrator, Sean Barrett, does his laconic, lapidary prose full justice. We are in the Big Country: Texas in 1980, with drug barons pumping slugs every which way. When Llewellyn Moss happens on a massacre and purloins a satchel containing $4.5 million, he appears doomed. But isn't he our hero? Surely he can outwit a psychotic hit man who enjoys macabre rituals of death? Don't hold your breath.' - Christina Hardyment, The Times Publishers Weekly Best Books 2009: 'Barrett delivers a standout performance in an artful abridgement that captures the essence of McCarthy's classic. Set along the border between the U.S. and Mexico, the story follows the tragic and bloody adventures of Llewelyn Moss, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and the sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh. When Moss makes off with millions of dollars of drug money, his life changes forever as both Bell and Chigurh pursue him, the latter leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake. Barrett's portrayal of Moss, Bell, and Chigurh are pitch perfect as are his renditions of the secondary characters and of the sheriff's first-person reminiscences interspersed throughout the novel. This audio book is a rare gem and a mandatory listening for McCarthy fans.' 'The source for the superb film No Country for Old Men is the equally superb short novel by Cormac McCarthy. Just as the casting of Javier Bardem for the movie role of killer-for-hire Anton Chigurh was inspired, so too is Sean Barrett a befitting narrator for the audiobook version. Barrett voices Chigurh with chilling nonchalance. This characterization is made more engaging by his contrasting interpretations of the other characters, who are brought to life complete with west Texas accents and head-scratching consternation. The novel is taut and evenly paced; the dialogue terse and always believable. Barrett performs with an unerring sense of character, pace, and drama.' - J.L., AudioFile 'After I was warned that the movie would give me nightmares, the abridged version of this seriously violent story about double-crossing drug dealers on the Tex-Mex border seemed a wise choice. That old chestnut about a picture speaking a thousand words doesn't apply to McCarthy. He is as frugal with words as George IV, who insisted on laying the fires in Windsor Castle himself, was with fuel. In fewer than 40 McCarthy can describe the full horror of a desert massacre down to the dying breath of the only survivor pleading for water. What I hadn't reckoned on terror-wise was Sean Barrett's reading. Suspense, panic, desperation, madness, despair - I've heard him do all of them brilliantly in Stalingrad, Perfume, Malone Dies and many more, but I've never heard anyone identify as menacingly with the cold-blooded inhumanity of a psychopath as Barrett does here. Anton Chigurh, the hitman sent to recover $2A m stolen by a rival gang (or, more likely, by a dodgy cop), makes the judge in Blood Meridian, another McCarthy spine chiller, look as dangerous as Peter Rabbit. He has opaque blue eyes, ostrich-skin boots and a cattle-killing bolt gun to dispatch his victims. It leaves one heck of a mess but it's untraceable. If he's feeling generous his targets can stake their lives on the toss of a coin, but more often than not he asks politely if they will please look at him when he shoots them so that he can see the final terror in their eyes. If it sounds like gratuitous violence, remember that The Road, McCarthy's most recent book, won the Pulitzer prize. Nothing he does is gratuitous. Ed Tom Bell, the hapless sheriff on whose patch the drug drop takes place, is used to violence. His grandfather was gunned down on his doorstep, his father was killed in the first world war, his own platoon wiped out in the next, and the local guy who stumbles across the bullet-ridden bodies is a Vietnam veteran. But Chigurh's brand of evil plumbs new, incomprehensible depths that Sheriff Bell's old-school law can never hope to vanquish. Definitely not a feel-good book, but the combination of McCarthy and Barrett is addictive.' - Sue Arnold, The Guardian 'A fascinating blend of western, thriller and literary novel, No Country for Old Men had me glued to my headphones as Vietnam War vet Llewelyn Moss goes out hunting and comes across a drug deal that's gone very wrong near Mexico's border with America. He takes off with the $2million he finds at the scene only to be hunted in turn by the men who want their money back. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is determined to save Moss from them and from Anton Chigurh, a hitman of extreme and chilling violence. Superbly read by Sean Barrett, an English actor with a striking variety of American accents.' - Kati Nicholl, Express.co.uk 'It's difficult to imagine a better narrator for No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy than Sean Barrett, (after hearing this short novel performed), although (knowing his work) I'm sure that Tom Stechschulte is also superb in his version. What makes Barrett a great choice to speak the killer's words here is oddly similar to what made Javier Bardem a great choice for the character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers movie version. Barrett has an understated, calm, but not quite laid-back air about his delivery, with vocal characteristics to match. There's an element of tension present that the mirror surface can't quite hide. You expect the worst to happen, and it does. As for the story, if you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a escaped killer tracking a man who found a bag of money related to a failed drug buy. Tommy Lee Jones plays the sheriff in the movie, and he's trying to find both men before they find each other. Sounds simple enough. But as this morality tale plays out against the stark backdrop of west Texas it also expands its reach past mere entertainment into the realm of literature by extending its scope beyond three men in the desert to the bigger questions that have plagued man from the beginning. Hearing this audio movieA" version will be instructive for Coen brothers fans and screenwriters too, since you can compare, as I did, the dialogue between the book and the movie, and so see what choices the Coen brothers made in editing. Surprisingly, they stayed pretty much with the story, (except for one major scene), and were true to the dialogue too, but there are other subtle differences. (Some scenes were tightened, others emphasized by the Coens. Little extra dialogue was added, but some was subtracted.) By comparing, you will be able to figure out why (and which) things work better on the screen or on the page. As reader, Sean Barrett is an appropriate guide to this very original story, with spot-on west Texas accents and believable female characters, too. Speaking in the voice of the killer, though, he's chillingly real and a minimalist just like Chigurh himself - a man of few emotions, attuned to destiny, accepting of fate, just telling it like it is, whether you like what truths are revealed about the world or not.' - Jonathan Lowe, audiobookstoday.blogspot.com

Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns with a mesmerizing modern-day western. In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex-Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match. In a series of thoughtful first-person passages interspersed throughout, Sheriff Bell laments the changing world, wrestles with an uncomfortable memory from his service in WWII and-a soft ray of light in a book so steeped in bloodshed-rejoices in the great good fortune of his marriage. While the action of the novel thrills, it's the sensitivity and wisdom of Sheriff Bell that makes the book a profound meditation on the battle between good and evil and the roles choice and chance play in the shaping of a life. Agent, Amanda Urban. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.