Review: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

 

Let me start off by saying that I love Cormac McCarthy, and at the time of his death last summer I'd read all but his last two novels, ThePassenger and Stella Maris (which at the time were only available in hardback). I love his use of archaic, biblical and inventive language as well as the demands he puts on his readers—you don’t turn to McCarthy for an easy, straightforward read. His novels deal with complex themes (Love, Death, Violence, the nature of Good and Evil, and the nature of God), and you get the sense that McCarthy, himself, is grappling for understanding of both the world he has been cast into and the worlds he has created. The Passenger is no different—in fact, in many ways, it is even more challenging for its lack of a traditional narrative structure: a beginning, a middle and an ending.

On the surface, The Passenger feels familiar. It feels like genre fiction. When Bobby Western and a fellow salvage diver investigate a small plane that has crashed in the Gulf of Mexico, they find the fuselage intact, but the black box and one of the passengers are missing. It feels like the start of a mystery or even a thriller, a sense that intensifies as Bobby goes on the run, followed by unknown but seemingly malevolent pursuants. But then the story veers off course and never returns. Bobby’s story is a series of loose ends. Nothing is ever finished. There are no resolutions. And interspersed, throughout, is a second narrative—that of Bobby’s love interest, his long-deceased sister Alicia: a mentally-ill mathematical genius, visited by a troupe of apparently benign apparitions.

As for the style of writing, the language in The Passenger is seemingly more accessible than McCarthy’s masterpiece BloodMeridian, which is trance-like in its puzzle of biblical references. Peppered as it is, though, with philosophical musings, questions about quantum mechanics and mathematical quandaries, this novel is no less dense. The Passenger is a novel that stretches this reader’s intellect and deserves more than one reading. For me, this book—McCarthy’s penultimate gift—while not yet as mesmerising as Blood Meridian is a book I feel compelled to read again.

Sadly, McCarthy is no longer America’s greatest living writer. I have no doubts, however, that he will long be considered one of the greatest American writers of all time.

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Loree Westron is the author of Missing Words. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is the founder of the Portsmouth Authors Collective.