Cormac McCarthy – The Passenger – Comment

 

There are novels that a reader can read, enjoy and move on without a second thought about the story. Then there are Cormac McCarthy novels that, after turning the last page, the characters, ideas, and themes can sometimes haunt you for weeks. The Passenger is one such text. Many had great expectations for the publication of this novel. Mainstream critics mostly had mixed emotions. Comparing The Passenger to his other novels like the masterpiece, Blood Meridian, is a disservice to his current novel. More so, making comparisons to earlier novels reveals a critic's laziness, and a refusal to delve into its embedded propositions and ideas. McCarthy's latest stands alone, and dare I say a masterpiece?

The novel opens strangely. A woman is in bed to awaken to a band of sideshow entertainers led by a character called The Kid. We see that he's deformed with flippers for hands and a childish, sarcastic sense of humor. The woman seems to know these characters and is reluctant to speak with them out of boredom. Only later do we discover that these are the woman's hallucinations as she suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia. She is also the younger sister of the novel's main protagonist, Robert Western.

It's 1980 in Mississippi, where Bobby Western is part of a diving team hired to salvage sunken ships and planes. The plane lays unusually flat under the water, and the dive team must break into the wreckage, to find 9 bodies strapped in their seats; missing is the pilot's Flight bag and the aircraft's Black Box. More mysterious is the flight manifest recorded 10 passengers – and strangely, there is a passenger missing.

As the plot unfolds, we find out that Western is a physicist, a few months shy of his PhD from Cal Tech. He's an extremely resourceful and intelligent man who has an array of peculiar friends. After the mysterious plane dive, Western is visited by the FBI. Always suspicious, they ask Western if he had taken anything from the wreckage and other vague questions. Later his room is broken into, and his old cat is traumatized, so he moves to another room above a bar down the street.

For reasons that the reader is unaware of, the “Feds” continue to harass Western, and eventually freeze his bank accounts and impound his car. It's then he goes on the lam.

Because Western's father was one of the scientists that created the Atomic Bomb, this could well be a black mark on his family, causing undue attention from “The Feds”.

Over a third of the novel is devoted to Alicia Western and her interactions with her hallucinations. Alicia Western is a mathematical prodigy, accepted at the University of Chicago at the age of 13. It is hinted that the young woman is much more than a genius, almost having an otherworldly intelligence. Connecting to 'normal' people is impossible. Alicia's only real connection is to her brother, Bobby.

The central theme of The Passenger is the intense love that Western and his sister have for each other. One could say this love transcends passion for it consumes Western all through his life. He feels guilty he wasn't there for her when she decided to end her life. The notions of loss and love and the purpose of existence are explored at length in the text.

At face value, the love Western has for his sister is disturbing, because it's unusual. This was not a sexual relationship, but a spiritual connection, that our protagonist feels to his core.

The vast majority of the tale is Western and his many friends in conversation over dinner and/or drinks, discussing all the unanswerable questions regarding society, God, Love, Quantum physics, and the existential questions of life. These dialogues were fascinating, and confusing, especially Quantum theory.

These questions are never answered, yet that dark cloud of nothingness and lack of meaning hangs over us like the never-ending empty void that is life.

McCarthy's signature elegant, no-nonsense prose throughout The Passenger borders on the beautiful.

A pleasure and privilege to read.