Book Review
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
It is more than 15 years since Cormac McCarthy’s last novel was published, and for those of the faith the reward is rich indeed. Not one, but two novels published simultaneously in this, his 89th year.
In The Passenger, protagonist and salvage diver Bobby Western uncovers a mystery while on assignment: a small passenger jet submerged in the murky waters around New Orleans, all passengers deceased and present at the scene bar one who is missing. Also missing is the aircraft’s black box flight recorder. Bobby’s suspicion of conspiracy is further aroused by the appearance of mysterious agents who pursue and hector him, ransacking his home, all without explanation.
New Orleans is perhaps the perfect environment from which emerges a host of fabulous characters: a flamboyant and erudite counterfeiter; a glamorous trans stage performer; a clairvoyant private investigator (who offers compellingly credible testimony on the subject of the Kennedy assassination). It is a miscellany of societal oddments, all drawn into the knotty thread by Bobby’s taciturn charisma.
Bobby is somewhat of a mathematical wunderkind, eclipsed by the genius of his younger sister, Alicia, who was admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of 13. Upon recognition of his sister’s superiority, Bobby transferred his attention to the study of physics. It seems Bobby is genetically predisposed since their father was a critical player in the Manhattan Project.
Bobby and Alicia’s relationship is a complex one. Their love for one another is all-consuming yet unconsummated. The prologue informs us of her death by suicide that Bobby cannot and will not reconcile. The high-concept, deeply theoretical sphere of advanced mathematics and physics makes a perfect firmament for these two characters, whose abiding love cannot be countenanced by society. Hence, Bobby engages in high- risk pursuits such as Formula 2 race car driving, and of course salvage diving.
In the present, Bobby’s mystery is compounded by unexplained deaths and spectral visitations. The IRS seizes his car, and freezes his bank accounts. Surely the mysterious agents’ activities cannot be explained by something so banal as income tax delinquency. Bobby lights out for the territories, wintering in an abandoned farmhouse in Idaho, enduring bitter cold and undernourishment. He makes his way to the psychiatric facility of Stella Maris, seeking some closure before his return to New Orleans where he must speculate on his perilous future.
While The Passenger is less bloodthirsty than many of McCarthy’s novels, it is certainly still dark. Yet it also offers more humour than any other McCarthy book that I can recall, and as the author informs us, every theatre has a ghost light, so it is never completely dark.
Stella Maris is presented as a coda to The Passenger. In essence, it is a transcript of psychiatric sessions with Alicia Western at the facility to which she had herself committed. The Passenger introduced us to The Thalidomide Kid, an ectromelic phantasm of Alicia’s own device, and while Stella Maris offers more detail on this vaudevillian homunculus with a penchant for malapropisms and misquotation, it more importantly fleshes out Alicia’s tragic relationship with Bobby.
Centrally, however, Stella Maris is focused on Alicia’s ruminations on unanswerable questions through the prismatic spectra of great thinkers such as Kant, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, sharpened in focus by the forensic lens of a mind trained in the pursuit of absolutes.
