posted on 23 Jan 2023

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

Recently I reread and reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian – partly by way of revisiting what I still regard as his masterpiece, and partly by way of preparing to read The Passenger, the first of the two linked novels that McCarthy has just published on the cusp of his 90th birthday. I have just finished it and scarcely know what to make of it.

I approached this new novel with considerable trepidation. Along with its coda, Stella Maris, it is proving divisive and reviews are polarised. Even the most favourable review I have so far read (here, on BookForum) is is at times exasperated and leaves the reviewer asking whether McCarthy is our ‘most minor major novelist’ or our ‘most major minor novelist’. I do understand what he means. McCarthy’s talent is prodigious but flawed; or perhaps merely used cavalierly. He seems to have no regard for the court of public opinion and cares little what critics might make of his books. In any case, of all the subjects that now interest him, he says, ‘writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list’. He is far more interested in quantum physics, the philosophy of mathematics and evolutionary theory – the kind of complex, groundbreaking ideas that are the stuff of daily conversation at the Santa Fe Institute where he has been a fellow for several decades now and where much of his time is spent.

And yet not only does he persist in writing fiction; in his ninetieth year he has published what many will regard as his most challenging novel yet and in some respects his most ambitious.

Paradoxically, putting the story plainly doesn’t help all that much. The novel takes place in 1980/81 and is set mainly in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It concerns Bobby and Alicia Western, brother and sister, who it seems are atoning for the sins of both their father – one of the inventors of the atom bomb – and themselves: they have had an incestuous relationship that may have resulted in the birth of a deformed and stillborn child (the allusions to this are ambiguous), contributing to Alicia’s madness and suicide in the early-70s. 

Bobby, despite having at one time been left a fortune by his grandmother, lives self-punishingly like a drifter and makes his living as a salvage diver. He has also been a Formula 2 racing driver. Both he and Alicia are maths prodigies but it is Alicia who was the really intelligent one, the real prodigy – scientist, mathematician, acclaimed violinist and breathtaking beauty. 

The story is interspersed with seventeen letters that are for the most part dialogues between Alicia and her ‘familiars’, cohorts of her damaged and troubled mind – the ‘horts’ she calls them affectionately – and is loosely underpinned with a metaphysical conspiracy thriller plot that involves a passenger missing from an underwater aircraft wreck that Bobby and a co-diver are sent to investigate; unnamed agents of some shadowy wing of the US government who impound his savings, car and passport; and the mysterious deaths of some of Bobby’s closest friends, including Oiler, his co-diver. It all sounds too far-fetched to furnish anything like a plausible plot for a novel and you might think the result would be an indigestible mess.

But somehow, it isn’t. I won’t for one moment pretend that the novel isn’t flawed – it is at least thirty or forty pages too long – but it contains a feast of arcane and provocative ideas, flights of imagination so audacious that they leave one open-mouthed, and some of the most transcendent, most extraordinary prose McCarthy has ever written. I have never read anything quite like it – and that includes most of McCarthy’s other novels.

That said, I do think its influences are more evident than in much of McCarthy’s other work. At times it reads a little like the densely written and claustrophobic conspiracy novels of Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon. There are echoes of William Burroughs and James Joyce in the macabre invention, twisted puns, paradoxes and spoonerisms of Alicia’s letters, especially in the awful invention of The Thalidomide Kid, a foul-mouthed, wise-cracking, vaudevillean character who is stunted, wears ‘oarlike shoes’ and has ‘seal’s flippers’ instead of fully-formed arms and a ‘hairless skull corraded with the scars perhaps come by at his unimaginable creation’. Some of the descriptive writing, especially landscapes, night and fires (all favourite McCarthy subjects) could come straight from McCarthy’s own Blood Meridian (though The Passenger has none of the earlier novel’s gruesome, blood-boltered violence).

This novel may well rank amongst McCarthy’s greatest achievements – although it is perhaps also the one in which his essentially tragic vision of profound pessimism and stoicism most runs the risk of self-parody. For example, Western’s debauched but erudite friend, John Sheddan, tells him: ‘When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.’ (Yes, that’s how he speaks: all the time.) One can’t help feeling that this is perhaps McCarthy’s own central message; but one must also allow for what I think is McCarthy’s dark and utterly deadpan humour.

Although there is another novel after this I shall probably let things rest with The Passenger. It reads rather as if it is McCarthy’s final transmission, as I saw one commenter on a fan website term it. If you have never read any McCarthy then it is probably not the best place to start; but if you have been reading him over the years then it does feel like the natural point to conclude. It is an extraordinary book.

 

Alun Severn

January 2023

 

Cormac McCarthy elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

 

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

 

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

 

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

 

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy