I am compelled to start by noting: Cormac McCarthy is probably my favourite author (in the top five anyway; the dog curled against me as I type this is named Cormac), and as I read all of McCarthy’s oeuvre before joining Goodreads, The Passenger is the first of his novels that I have attempted to review; and the task feels daunting. Of course I loved this, I expected to, and while I had the familiar visceral reaction to his sentences, and while I had an intense mental engagement with his overarching philosophy, I also recognise that this novel serves as a synthesis of all of McCarthy’s previous work; this has the feeling of a legacy project and I don’t know that it can be fully read or reviewed on its own (by which I suppose I mean that the plot of The Passenger isn’t its most important or straightforward element and it might be dissatisfying to someone who isn’t soul-stuffed with the previous works to which it hearkens). However, it would take a thesis-length essay to write down everything I’m thinking and feeling, and nobody wants that, so, suffice to say: I did love this, and I could objectively give The Passenger five stars, but I am going to give it four only as a measure against those of McCarthy’s own previous novels that stuffed my soul and taught me what the novel could do. Spoilerish from here.He motored slowly down the point and along the south shore of the island. The gulf was calm in the last of the light and lights had begun to come up along the shore to the west. He swung the boat around and twisted the throttle slowly forward and headed north, taking his bearings by the lights along the causeway. It was cold out on the water with the sun down. The wind was cold. By the time he got to the marina he thought that the man who’d gone ashore on the island was almost certainly the passenger.
Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.
The titular “passenger” (as referenced in the first quote) seems a MacGuffin to engine the plot: Bobby Western is a salvage diver who is afraid of the murky deep, and in the opening scene, he is working with a partner to search for survivors on a submerged plane off the Mississippi coast. Western notes that the pilot’s flight bag and the plane’s black box had been removed, and when he is later visited by some government agents, he learns that one of the plane’s passengers had also disappeared before his search began. The mystery of this missing passenger hangs over the plot, and eventually, Western learns how powerless a citizen is in the face of government displeasure. And while there seems to be a direct link between Western having his assets and passport seized and the frequent visits from the mysterious men in black, we also learn that a burglary at his grandmother’s house had seen all of his family’s papers and photographs stolen; is there a bigger conspiracy at play involving the entire Western family? That’s pretty much the story arc, but there’s so much more to the novel.
Western’s father had been a genius — one of the architects of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan — and the following recounts his fact-finding trip at the end of the war (presaging the opening salvage dive, with the father discovering “passengers” of his own):
There were people who escaped Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.
The only other meaningful use of the word “passengers” that I happened upon also concerned birds, which seems to tie into this passage: One spring, Western discovers migratory birds laying on the beach, exhausted from their flight across the Gulf of Mexico, “You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.” The son protecting these “weary passerines” as penance for his father’s sins perhaps?
Like the father, Bobby Western and his much younger sister, Alicia, are also certified geniuses: Bobby had an interest in maths until he got to Caltech, whereupon he changed his major to physics and then dropped out altogether; becoming a salvage diver, he’s an eidetic polymath who can mentally calculate the weight of water in a submerged barge or remember a badge number after a brief flash. (This rejection of one’s inheritance — intellectual and material — in order to live rough at blue collar work, obviously, puts one in mind of the title character from Suttree.) But the real genius of the family is Alicia: a mathematical savant of the highest order, her brand of intellect is accompanied by schizophrenia and bizarre phantasmagoria headlined by a flipper-handed, scabby-skulled dwarf (known alternately as an electromelic hallucination, a spectral operator, a pathogen, but most often as the Thalidomide Kid or “The Kid”; “The Kid” being, elsewhere, the name of one of McCarthy’s best-loved characters [at least, best-loved by me]). Alicia is cursed with the genius to understand the futility of existence; the impossibility of understanding or describing this pointless world (whether by physics or mathematics or the written word), and when she is visited by The Kid (in long scenes that open every chapter), he’s inclined to share something like the following:
Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you dont. Not in your heart you dont. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. And now, good night.
* A pause for a note on the language: This passage is copied as found, with McCarthy refusing the apostrophe for contractions like “cant” and “dont”, but allowing them in “that’s” and “you’re”. And I don’t pretend to understand his rules. As ever, McCarthy eschews quote marks for dialogue, and I was often struck by his eye-jarring (but brain-satisfying) portmanteaus like: spraddlelegged, parchmentcolored, or “the cold clay of her childsbody”. He’s Cormac McCarthy, he can write how he pleases and it will please me.
The other thing to know about Alicia: she’s a striking, ethereal beauty, and when Bobby returned from college one year and saw his (thirteen-year-old) sister performing a solo Greek tragedy in a natural amphitheatre on their grandmother’s property, he realised that he was in love with her and, eventually, that that love was mutual; the forbidden fruit that would ruin each of them for any other (echoing, faintly, Outer Dark). Sent for electroshock therapy and committed with her willing consent, her grasp of the unreality of reality challenges Alicia’s will to live, and therefore challenges Bobby’s:
In his dreams of her she wore at times a smile he tried to remember and she would say to him almost in a chant words he could scarcely follow. He knew that her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories and in his dreams and soon after nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or perhaps just her Grecian sheeting crossing a stone stage in the smoking footlamps or she would push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him I’d have been your shadowlane, the keeper of that house wherein your soul is safe. And all the while a clangor like the labor of a foundry and dark figures in silhouette about the alchemic fires, the ash and the smoke. The floor lay littered with the stillborn forms of their efforts and still they labored on, the raw halfsentient mud quivering red in the autoclave. In that dusky penetralium they press about the crucible shoving and gibbering while the deep heresiarch dark in his folded cloak urges them on in their efforts. And then what thing unspeakable is this raised dripping up through crust and calyx from what hellish marinade. He woke sweating and switched on the bedlamp and swung his feet to the floor and sat with his face in his hands. Dont be afraid for me, she had written. When has death ever harmed anyone?
These are all the big things that are happening in The Passenger, but McCarthy fills the gaps with smaller (but no less interesting) content. Bobby Western is based in New Orleans (the year is 1980), and when he’s not working (or hiding from the feds), he meets friends (from an intellectual counterfeiter who can speak Western’s language, to drunken bums, to a bombshell trans woman) at various bars and restaurants, and the conversations range from experiences in the Vietnam War, to discussions about quantum mechanics and the personalities behind the theories, and a deep dive into who really assassinated JFK. Western travels to his grandmother’s property in Tennessee, to an offshore oil rig, to a California highway hemmed in by forest fires (and the sooty wasteland resultant is straight out of The Road; straight out of Bobby’s father’s wartime work), and, perhaps purposefully quixotic, to a windmill in Spain. And why not quixotic? Who’s to say that Don Quixote’s version of reality is any less real than Alicia’s reality, than Einstein’s, than anyone who believes that a government is in place to serve, rather than to surveil, its citizens? Many, many times throughout The Passenger, Western watches lightning flashing through the sky; several times he feels the pulse of massive manmade objects — a piledriver, an offshore oil rig’s prime mover, a millstone — throbbing beneath his feet, and as we watch him balanced thusly between the celestial and the mundane, isn’t he the passenger — aren’t we all? — with little control over the plane, the trolleycar, the life he’s trapped in? (When Bobby first left college, he became a racecar driver, and even though it would seem that he had control then, he was forced to realise that racing is at the whim of the car itself; and anyway, a crash eventually ended that career. Lesson learned.)
I have noted before a common theme in McCarthy’s novels (where there is no higher authority to appeal to — whether in the Appalachian backcountry, the Wild West, or the Mexican borderlands a hundred years ago, through to some bleak dystopian future — men will default to self-interested savagery), and he makes that point once again here:
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. It should be quite a spectacle. However brief.
This is long, longer than I intended — and I have so many more thoughts; so many more quotes and hearkenings! — but if it is impossible to describe physical reality with mathematical equations, it is equally unlikely that I can capture the essence of this reading experience with my clumsy and imprecise words; McCarthy reaches me on a soul level, and much is necessarily lost in the translation to English.
