The Passenger

The Passenger #1

by Cormac McCarthy

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wetsuit and plunges from the boat deck into darkness. His divelight illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flightbag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit – by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous bar rooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Literary Fiction, Literature, Thriller, Audiobook

385 pages, Hardcover

First published October 25, 2022

About the author

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written twelve novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres and has also written plays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 1925 and 2005, and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. In 2009, Cormac McCarthy won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the PEN American Center.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cormac McCarthy, America's finest author of postmodern westerns, switches gears and gives us a kafkaesk pageturner about a salvage diver named Bobby Western (A+ for literary trolling, love it). But make no mistake: This novel still ponders American myth, the 89-year-old author creatively twists his classic themes into a novel that feels fresh and only familiar if you look closer at what McCarthy does. Let's try to disentangle the intricate plot: Bobby and his colleagues dive for a sunken airplane, but find one body and the black box missing. Suddenly, agents start chasing Bobby, rumaging his apartment and questioning him, one of his colleagues mysteriously dies in Venezuela, the government strips Bobby of his financial means and voids his passport, citing tax issues. Yes, folks: Plotline A is The Trial, McCarthy style.

Meanwhile, we learn that Bobby was in love with his schizophrenic sister Alice/Alicia (both names exist in the novel, adding to the general feeling of destabilization) who killed herself, and that he is still grieving her. In intersections, we meet Alice/Alicia - and her hallucinations, worn out vaudeville and minstrel characters she has philosphical conversations with. At least that is we as readers think, until Bobby meets one of them in real life... or is it a dream? a coma? The whole novel is one big oscillation, a mirage.

And, as promised, we have smart twists on American myth: Bobby inherits gold and has to dig for it in his grandmother's basement (the poor man's goldrush); he gets into oil - at least at an oil rig (hello, No Country for Old Men); he takes trips that complement his inner journey , but not only to the West (frontier pushing/On the Road), but in all directions, even becoming a race car driver in Europe at some point; aaaand - you've been waiting for it, you get it! - this is my fellow Catholic McCarthy, so we ponder one of the original sins of America, which in this case is not the genocide the country was build on (Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West), but the atom bomb: Bobby's father worked with Oppenheimer, and Bobby is haunted by intergenerational guilt.

The novel heavily relies on dialogue, it is almost an oral history of everyday America and its relationship with American history: We get many, many scenes in bars and other closed quarters where Bobby talks about all kinds of things, from love to John F. Kennedy, with friends and acquaintances, including a transwoman - McCarthy is usually not a writer that incorporates many female perspectives, this is his first work that, with Alice/Alicia, even has a female protagonist. The many dialogues mirror the theme of reflection and inward travel, but also allow the author to touch upon all kinds of additional subjects. Between that, we get many slower ruminations and highly complex scientific explanations: Not only was Bobby's father a physicist, Bobby also studied physics at Caltech, and his late sister was a math genius.

The time- and plotlines are fragmented and readers have to play close attention to stay on top of this ambitious work. As the plot progresses, Bobby gets further and further reduced, turning more and more inward. While most of McCarthy's other novels (just look at the border trilogy) describe nature as both beautiful and relentless, we now get powerful, luminous descriptions of the underwater world, a world that is also scary, cold, and deadly. This protagonist does not venture West, he ventures into the deep.

Sure, there is too much going on here, and the scientific details that now juxtapose the religious motif are excessively intricate, but you know what? This is a masterfully crafted, intelligent, ambitious pageturner, and I loved reading it (although what unsettled me is how McCarthy, as mentioned: 89, employed the passenger motif: There is A LOT of nonchalance here when it comes to passing over to the realm of the dead). On to the sibling novel that focuses on Alice/Alicia, Stella Maris.

Here's my radio piece about the "The Passenger", plus here's the whole interview with German translator Nikolaus Stingl (both in German).

[Tom Mooney · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an absolute privilege to get to read this a few months ahead of publication. It was perhaps the best day I've had as a bookseller when this arrived in the post.

It's seven years or more since I last read McCarthy. I had read The Road the year before and then devoured his entire catalogue in the space of 12 months. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I'd get to read new book of his. I assumed that ship had sailed.

So, alongside obvious excitement, I had some trepidation going into this; I am not the same reader I was seven years ago. I'm less patient, more reliant on plot, lazier. But I needn't have feared. Yes, this is more challenging than most of what I read these days but it was very much worth the effort.

It's a difficult book to summarise as there are several complex things going on. I won't even try. All I'll say is that The Passenger is a deeply felt, sad book about a man haunted by his sister's suicide and the appalling legacy of his father, trying to make sense if his life. It is softer than McCarthy's earlier work and more humane and reflective. There is humour, too, though much of it is of the dark variety.

Anyway, who cares what I think. It's a goddam new Cormac McCarthy for Christ's sake.

[s.penkevich]

Instant pre-order. Take my money . gif

[Jen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt like I had a brain injury, attempting to read this book last night. I couldn’t make sense of anything on the page. It was such a bizarre and confusing experience. The premise of the book sounded really interesting: divers going into a sunken plane wreck. But that isn’t what any of the pages I read were about. I started the book again this morning to make sure I had the right book…..and yet again, couldn’t follow the plot. I just don’t understand…?

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strange book —
I’m sitting in a Starbucks (waiting for a doctors appointment across the street)…. and just finished this ‘long’ book….

Tons of swearing—as in every other sentence—
But it also fits!
The best part of this oddball novel for me was the narrative- chatter- dialogues.

Parts were hilarious…
Other parts just weird!

Themes are strong: death, love, loss, fear and reconciling with God > and a ‘kiss-of-death’ love story between a brother and sister.

Here are a few excerpts to give a little taster….
“It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she’d dropped it and she wore only a white dress and it hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered.
That deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures”.
…. the above was the (dynamic & visual) beginning: a young woman had hanged herself.

More? Okay!
“We’re savage divers. We do what we are paid to do. Anyway, I’m sure you know more about this than I do”.
“All right. Thank you for your time.
“They rose from the couch simultaneously. Like birds leaving a wire. Western eased himself from the bed”.
“Maybe I really should look at those badges again”.
“You have a peculiar sense of humor, Mr. Western”.
“I know. I get that a lot”.

“Jesus, said the Kid, rising and coming forward. God’s bleeding piles. No no no no no. For the love of Christ. What the fuck do you think this is? You can’t come in here hawking this crap. We ask for straightforward acts and we get some fucking tinker minus his forelobes. Good God. Out. Jesus. All right. Who’s next? Christ. Where do you have to go for a little talent? To the fucking moon?”

“What’s out there? Dunno. Some atavism out of a dead ancestor’s psychosis come in out of the rain. Over there smoking in the corner. Well what the hell. Let me get the lights. No good. Shut off the projector. Who the fuck ordered this anyway? Roll up the screen and the fucking things are on the wall. The other thing you called me was a pathogen”.
“You are a pathogen”.
“See?”
“Are they coming in or not?”
“Is who coming in?”
“Cut it out. I know they’re out there”.
“The horts, that would be.
“That would be”.
“All in good time”.
“I can see their feet under the door. I can see the shadows of their feet”.
“Feet and the shadows of seat. Just like in the real world”.
“What are they waiting for?”
“Who knows? Maybe they don’t feel welcome”.

“The Passenger” is the first of a two-volume saga.

And….. THESE ARE the TWO excerpts that solidified my wanting to read this book:
“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which she deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget”.

“I had trouble with the God thing. A lot of people do. And then I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I was lying there and I thought:
If there is no higher power and I am it”.

[Ron Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the last 16 years, Cormac McCarthy’s swelling fan base has been circling, picking at crumbs of information about his next project. This month, the moment of unveiling has arrived with a tempest of publicity that’s sure to draw in even more readers.

Prepare to be baffled.

“The Passenger” exhibits McCarthy’s signature markings, but it’s a different species than we’ve spotted before. In these pages, the author’s legendary violence has been infinitely reduced to the clash of subatomic particles.

Bobby Western, the novel’s contemplative, haunted hero, works as a salvage diver. We meet him at 3:17 a.m. off the Gulf Coast. He and a small crew are examining a private jet resting on the ocean floor. After his partner cuts open the door with an underwater torch, Western swims into this fresh tomb:

“He kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away,” McCarthy writes. “The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation.”

A few minutes later, back in the inflatable boat, Western shakes his head. “There’s nothing about this that rattles right.” The bodies look unaffected by a crash. And the pilot’s flight bag and the data box are missing from the cockpit.

Western’s partner asks, “You think there’s already been somebody down there, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

For several days, Western hears nothing in the news about a jet crashing into the Gulf. Then two men with badges appear at his apartment in New Orleans. They want to know how many bodies he saw in the plane because “there seems to be a passenger missing.”

McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form just as he reworked the apocalypse in “The Road.” Indeed, “The Passenger” sometimes feels more reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Western knows he’s suspected of something, but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness — never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men” — but Western knows that his life is in danger and that he must run....

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

—Brilliant and exciting. A literary thriller but not a novel of action, more a contemplative thriller. The description is super vivid (48 fps), and the images pop.

—The novel starts well if you like the unrelievedly dark, as I do. McCarthy is word drunk in the best sort if way. His characters so far are all working stiffs. (A nice break from the billionaire greed so prevalent these days.) From this black background emerges some funny stuff too. Just absolutely hilarious passages usually voiced by Bobby's friends. Novel proceeds mostly as dialog.

—One scene is of a cool day on the Gulf within view of the coast. Bobby Western sits in the cabin of a tender drinking tea; he wears a wet suit. A private jet lies forty feet below the surface in Gulf waters. The Oiler is already down there cutting the door open with acetylene. Western puts on his diving equipment, tanks, fins, mouthpiece and jumps in. Western arrives just as the Oiler opens the aircraft's door. Inside are well-dressed corpses, a few wearing stylish Italian shoes; seven strapped in passengers, and two pilots. After a cursory examination Western and the Oiler go up to the tender whereupon all manner of questions arise about where the jet came from: who the passengers might be, why the plane has been under for what seems like three days, etc.

—We know the sister, Alice, through flashbacks. Her hallucinations are not chronological. In the scene at the start of the book she is older and planning her suicide. The language of her prime hallucination, The Thalidomide Kid, is very high flown. In a later sequences she's younger and still in school, In these scenes The Kid speaks more or less like everyone else. I wondered about that and it hit me — this is supposition at this point — that when the sister is older, and on the verge of self-destruction, she is crazier and thus her hallucinations are more disturbing, the Kid's lingo so absurdly rich, which may be why she plans to die by her own hand.

In another section, in what seems like an homage to the poet John Berryman, a character from his The Dream Songs, Mr. Bones, springs from those poems to entertain Alice. You might say the author was indulging in magic realism until you learn that the sister is in fact discussing her hallucinations with two note takers, presumably shrinks.

—Text sometimes dips quite startlingly into the Joycean, the Beckettian. This is a novel of at times intense narrative pleasures. Some Hemingway like passages too especially as Bobby walks around the streets of New Orleans, eats, sleeps, wakes up in the dead of night when it's not so easy to be hard boiled about things as it is during the day.

"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 that nowhere at all. She came in half nude trailing sarsenet or . . . 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 alone 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 half-sentient 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?" (p. 184)

—Turns out that one of the jet's passengers is missing. Well, how could that be? Didn't we see Oiler cut the door open? How could have anyone gotten out? We don't know who the passenger is or where he or she has gone. But strange men looking like G-men arrive at Bobby's rental late one night and begin questioning about the wreck. This is when he learns a passenger is missing. He moves out that night into a suicide's room above a bar. He feels more than knows he's being followed. Then one day his money in the bank is attached by the IRS, despite the fact that he owes no taxes. He hires a detective...

— I find the JFK content boring. It's like an unwelcome condensation out of Oswald's Tale. Fortunately the digression is brief. But don't let that dissuade you. See my first paragraph.

[Jessaka · Rating 2 out of 5]

What do you want to be when you grow up? Dead, said Alicia.

I am sitting on my couch reading this book by McCarthy, a book I waited years to read. But it is not really McCarthy's writing, not his lyrical writing. But at times it is. It just doesn't have the flow. I am disappointed.

The story opens up with Bob, a salvage diver who looks for wreckages. He has found one, and airplane that has crashed in the water. Once inside he sees people strapped to their seats, dead, their hair waving in the water..

But this story is not about these dead bodies, it's about his dead sister Who he is still in love with after all of these years. It's about her love letters that he has kept for over 10 years and has hidden behind the medicine cabinet so that they cant find them.

As I struggle with this difficult book, My mind has lost it's attention because there is a 7 year old girl standing next to me. She is black and she is wearing an orange and white checkered dress with a white collar and white cups around Puffy sleeves. Her tight curls are held up by 8 orange bows. So pretty. I don't mind her there except that she is moving her body from left to right, right to left. Like little girls off and do. The movement is distracting. If I turn my head to look at her she is gone, but she is still there at the corner of my eye.

Alicia is Bob's sister. She is in a mental hospital getting shock treatments for her depression. Maybe it will cure her of hallucinations, , I don't know.

It is the summer of 1969, just after Woodstock had ended. Rubinstein is the shock doctor at Herrick hospital in Berkeley California.
Maria goes for shock treatments daily for her depression, and when she leaves the room she is in a daze..One morning she did not show up for group therapy, But her young, handsome therapist was there, depressed. A young female patient in the group looked at him and said, Cheer up, the worst is yet to come. They learned them that maria had killed herself and by the next day they learn that her therapist has also committed suicide.

It is 1972 and Alicia has committed suicide. Shock treatment never really works.

Then they came and they ramsacked his room. And this because he had been on the plane and a passenger was missing.

And I am left wondering how a man can write a about a suicide and such beautiful words that you want to read it over and over again, but you know you shouldn't.

End I learned that Cormac McCarthy suffers from depression, and it felt like he was riding his own story here. I just hope he never does something like this. I hope I am wrong about him Because I know I was not wrong about maria's doctor.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way I read Cormac McCarthy is unbound from other authors. His mixture of stark and brimming-over prose is poetic and singular, often theatrical. I read a segment once, then twice, and then the third time out loud before moving on to the next part. Especially the dialogue-heavy pages. He’s one of the few writers that, through a cerebral pathway, can induce a visceral and even emotional response in me. He’s been working on this novel for years, and hangs with scientific brainiacs, which is foundational to this philosophical, metaphysical, and scientifically erudite novel.

Sure, he winks at us sometimes, throwing a few cheeky challenges our way; some may call it pompous or unreasonably opaque. Cagey. But it works for me. I inhaled this novel gradually, like I would one yoga breath after another. During exhales, I hear the doors and windows fly open in my soul’s belfry. McCarthy puts me in a cabalistic, alchemical zone. Even at 89, he’s one ruthless and rare writer.

I could go on and on about how CM makes me tick, but it’s a horizon that is almost like an acid trip. I can’t explain an acid trip, either, except to say that he stimulates all my senses and then creates new ones, it’s vast. Other dimensions. Bobby Western, the book’s protagonist, broke my heart, shattered it in pieces. He’s a saturnine, tragic but transcendent character. For all his tragedy, he is an attentive listener, a sympathetic ear. He lost his schizophrenic sister, Alicia, years ago by suicide, and is inconsolable. She was eighteen. She was the love of his life. You can’t turn away from it.

Bobby left physics for math and then school altogether, and is a middle-aged salvage diver now. Early on in the novel, he dives with his partner, to check out a mysterious plane crash, the passengers all in their seats, one missing. And the black box is gone. It piques him, and you see him follow-up in his own way. Bobby has reason to be paranoid. His late father helped create the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. There are figures out there who want his papers, his facts, quarks, calculations.

CM is the father and pioneer of desert gothic, neo-biblical gothic, and now he infuses his style into city gothic. The story takes place in 1980 and goes back in time to when Alicia was alive. In the italicized sections, she interacts with her vaudevillian hallucination, the Thalidomide Kid, who is mostly referred to as the Kid (different from the Kid in Blood Meridian, but a purposeful moniker). The Kid often speaks in clichés, but the texture deepens with the story. He comes with a roomful of other burlesque characters, colorful and noisy. Alicia is a mathematical genius, but the paradox of numbers triggered a meltdown; she couldn’t handle her own brilliance. She and Bobby almost killed me.

McCarthy is the reluctant pied piper of those like me who will follow him to all his emotional minefields. He knows how to rattle your psychic chains. He’s an engineer, a mechanic, a physicist, a mathematician, a playwright, a writer of last words.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s 1980 and a small plane crashes into the ocean killing all nine passengers aboard. But when salvage diver Robert Western enters the underwater plane, he finds only eight bodies. Then men in black start showing up to ask him: what did he see down there? Did he take anything from the wreckage? And does he believe in aliens…

The Passenger is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road in 2006 and, like buses, after waiting for ages more than one shows up at the same time - the other half of this story, Stella Maris, is being published just a few weeks from now.

I really enjoyed No Country for Old Men, both the novel and the movie, the latter of which is a cinematic masterpiece, but not much else by McCarthy - The Road and The Counsellor were both terrible, I tried and gave up on Blood Meridian (supposedly his magnum opus) and All the Pretty Horses, and I didn’t think much of his latest, The Passenger, either. I don’t think this writer is for me.

The Passenger has a very meandering, pointless narrative. The premise above only really describes a small portion of the novel. The government suits show up throughout to ask questions and continually hound Western, but nothing further happens regarding the surviving passenger - who they are, where the plane was going, why it crashed, why the government is so interested; it all gets ignored entirely. It’s basically a red herring.

Because that passenger isn’t really the titular character. I think Western is the passenger, in a metaphorical sense. The story is about him dealing with the grief of losing his beloved younger sister Alicia, who, after leaving the Stella Maris mental institution, commits suicide. Most of the narrative focuses on Western drifting through his life - whereas once, before she killed herself, he had drive and agency, now he is passive, like a passenger, letting life take him where it will; he doesn’t care anymore.

Which is an unfortunate choice because when it was about the literal passenger? It was a pretty fun story. Then McCarthy abandons that thread to fill the book with so much dead-end dross that it killed any interest I had in what was going on - not that much does. In place of a substantive thriller story we get Western sitting down with a string of random people to have conversations about random subjects: Vietnam, the JFK assassination, the life story of a transwoman, and an excruciatingly dull section on physics, to name a few.

One character called John Sheddan talks many times throughout and extensively about nothing, in a pretentious manner like a caricature of a southern gentleman, as does Kline, the private investigator who advises Western once his legal troubles begin. No idea what Western’s dad being involved in the Manhattan Project had to do with anything either - just more padding?

On the one hand, these digressions seem to serve no purpose - either in relation to the missing passenger or Western’s grief - but, on the other, as irrelevant as they are, they’re among the best passages in the book(definitely not the physics part though). The JFK assassination part is especially good, and I’d recommend Oliver Stone’s enthralling 2021 documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass if this section peaks your interest.

McCarthy’s also not doing anything impressive in his portrait of a grieving brother. Western gets sad and mopes around. He goes here, he goes there, he talks to this person, he talks to that person - he’s sad the whole time. Because - get this! - people get sad when they lose loved ones. Wow. That’s… obvious. So obvious in fact that it seems ludicrous to write a novel about something so ordinary that says nothing that anyone wouldn’t already know from simply being alive.

Each chapter opens with a few pages told in flashback from the perspective of Western’s crazy sister Alicia, who’s also a genius, where she’s talking to imaginary creatures. I didn’t understand the point of these parts either - we understand from other characters that she was mentally ill, probably schizophrenic, and these sections underline that, again and again. Do we need the repetition? Particularly as they’re not entertaining to read either.

There’s so much about this book that’s superfluous, it makes me wonder if the story could’ve been one book instead of two. I guess publishing’s still a business, eh? Gotta make money somehow. And maybe the missing passenger storyline gets resolved in the next book? Because, even though it’s called Stella Maris, the name of the mental hospital Alicia was committed to, there wasn’t any indication here that there was anything unresolved about that part of the story that requires another entire book to delve into. I think we got plenty about all of that in this one.

Like many of his books, The Passenger is filled with lots of dialogue and, to be totally fair to McCarthy, much of it is good - it sounds realistic and you buy the authenticity of it (maybe too much in the case of the physics discussion). As usual, he doesn’t go in for your fancypants big city quotation marks or apostrophes, or any indication of who’s speaking (he said, she said, Western said, etc.) so it’s not uncommon to speed through an exchange and lose the thread of who’s speaking. But that’s usually only the case in the conversations that don’t matter (ie. most of them) because in the more engaging dialogues, McCarthy gives the characters’ voices enough nuance so that you can tell which one is Western and which is the other person.

The overall effect of the novel is of a half-baked idea filled out with a lot of unrelated nonsense. Like McCarthy knew that writing about a brooding man wouldn’t sell by itself and he had all these dialogues he’d written about random topics so decided to sprinkle these throughout to liven things up.

The novel starts well, the dialogue throughout is very strong and the occasional conversational deviation is compelling but too much of it was tediously rambling, vague and ultimately unimpressive in what McCarthy was driving at. I’ll finish out the series by reading Stella Maris when it’s published but my expectations for it are way down there after reading The Passenger and I’d caution anyone thinking about picking this one up not to expect anything special either. If you’ve never read it before, or want to get a flavour of the heights this author can achieve, I recommend checking out No Country for Old Men instead of this trying snorefest.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Real trouble doesn’t begin in a society until boredom has become its most general feature. Boredom will drive even quiet minded people down paths they’d never imagined.”
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“Every remedy for loneliness only postpones it.”
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Cormac McCarthy needs no introduction as a world renown writer, his works have been hailed for decades and he is known as one of the greatest living authors, all the accolades could never prepare you for what he has created with “The Passenger”. McCarthy’s first book in sixteen years shows him flexing on the literary world, almost mocking anyone to come and try to compete, I’m sure few will attempt after reading this stellar novel. Was the book perfect? I’d argue not even close, was it a clustered and mashed together rambling incoherent babbling of a finely tuned writer? Quite possibly yes. We get all the things typical of a Cormac novel, the phenomenal dialogue and ambient scenery descriptions that make it hard to fathom not actually being there. At the end of the day this was an absolutely extraordinary work of art in a world that has lacked substance for some time
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Let me explain now, the plot written out on the back of this novel says its about a sunken jet with nine passengers and one missing body, and while this event takes place towards the beginning of the novel, it really has no bearing over the story at all, a minor filler for a bigger picture of a man reckoning with his life. McCarthy uses two narratives here, the first being italicized, is of our main characters dead sister and her schizophrenic hallucinations. At first these are quite jarring as we don’t know the context but become more and more intriguing as the book continues, her mathematical skills and worldly theories lend to the belief that most geniuses are crazy, as do her supporting cast of cohorts that take up residence in her mind and visions
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Her brother Western is the main protagonist and the story dances around him and his group of friends spanning from Louisiana across the southern united states, they almost seem to crawl from bar room to odd job back to the bar room. Their constant takes on life, death, and philosophical entities are a spectacle to behold. Again McCarthy really let loose on this one, touching from the carnal love of a brother and sister, to string theory, to mathematical relativity, the atomic bomb and its creation, and many late 1800’s to early 1900’s philosophers. We as readers simply become the missing passenger from the plain wreck as we let Cormac take us on the ride of a lifetime. Was I shocked by the magnitude of this novel, I was not, but I was dumbfounded by the execution and ease the author seemed to tackle everything, I truly believe this was McCarthy pulling out all the stops and having a good time. One I can say with confidence I don’t think all readers will be having.

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe not the best choice for the first Cormac McCarthy book.

The passenger seemed less difficult than expected. But that was just a deceitful feeling.

The book is constructed as a series of conversations about different, random subjects. And it was easy to follow those discussions. But in the end, I can't see the big picture.

Maybe I will see it in the sequel. Maybe I need more time to think about it. Maybe I can't accept that this was a disappointment.

[Lorna · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and chrystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stones. One of her yellow boots had fallen off and stood in the snow beneath her. The shape of her coat lay dusted in the snow where she'd dropped it and she wore only a white dress and she hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees with her head bowed and her hands turned slightly outward like those of certain ecumenical statues whose attitude asks that their history be considered. That the deep foundation of the world be considered where it has its being in the sorrow of her creatures."

"She had tied her dress with a red sash so that she'd be found. Some bit of color in the scrupulous desolation. On this Christmas day. This cold and barely spoken Christmas day."

And so begins The Passenger, the long awaited book that Cormac McCarthy has purportedly been working on since the 1980s and thought to be somewhat autobiographical. This lyrical, melancholic and extraordinary book is notable for the beautiful and haunting prose in this character-driven novel. The best way to read this book is to just relinquish oneself to go where the author takes one. And this is to the depths of the Gulf of Mexico as Bobby Western, although haunted by the darkness of the deep sea, he is a salvage diver in the opening passage exploring a downed charter jet carrying eight passengers but as we later discover that one passenger is missing as well the pilot's flight bag and the black box. But how is a mystery.

Much of the novel takes place in New Orleans where Western lives in the French Quarter and is frequently meeting with friends for a drink or dinner at some of the finest and established restaurants including Commander's Palace, Napolean House, Cafe Du Monde, Pat O'Brien's, and the historic Tujague. In the course of these conversations with friends much is learned about Bobby Western and the intense and complicated relationship with his sister Alicia and with his father.

As the story progresses, Bobby Western is haunted by the suicide of his younger sister and surveillance and harassment by unknown people, presumably from the government and IRS. He is not sure whether it has to do with his father, a brilliant physicist working for J. Robert Oppenheimer and instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb that leveled the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He and his sister were also brilliant, although Bobby conceded that he could not approach the brilliance of his sister Alicia. This is a book filled with beautiful and haunting prose as well as the intricacies of quantam mechanics, physics, the post World War II history of the Cold War, and the Kennedy assassination.

Bobby Western is being dogged by the IRS and other unknown persons, he thinks because of his father, a renowned nuclear physicist, who worked so closely with Oppenheimer in the development of the atomic bomb. His father was an admirer of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a man well versed in Shakespeare and The Bhagavad Gita and also conflicted about what he had wrought.

"Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima."

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer on October 16, 1946

"We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life."

-- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1953

[Marc Kozak · Rating 3 out of 5]

I consider Cormac to be one of the few actual living Geniuses still putting out novels (even if it's been 16 years since the last one), so my anticipation for this was at the level of drooling while repeatedly rocking back and forth. For the first 100 pages or so, I was in heaven. Cormac is BAC, baby! But a painful realization began to set in around page 200 or so -- I was not enjoying this anymore. By the end of the book, I was completely lost. It hurt a little bit to click on the 3 star rating.

The story is set up very well, and consists of three basic parts: 1) the story of Bobby Western, a salvage diver in the Mexican Gulf, who discovers a charter plane pull of passengers sitting 40 feet under the water. One passenger on the manifest is seemingly missing, and shadowy figures are starting to converge on Western to find out what he found out on the dive. Western is a classic McCarthy character, impossibly intelligent but also a quiet, brooding drifter living basically in poverty.

Part 2): the hallucinations of Western's mentally ill sister Alicia, who Western also was happened to be in love with. Alicia has a series of conversations with the Thalidomide Kid, a sort of ringleader of a gang of minstrels who seem to want to perform for Alicia for reasons unknown. These sections are difficult to get through at times, especially since Alicia asks the Kid MANY direct questions (why are you here, what do you want, etc) that the Kid just never answers.

And Part 3): Western meets a series of different people for dinner, coffee or drinks, and has long philosophical conversations about a wild assortment of topics. These sections go on for 15-30 pages and are almost completely dialogue (of course with no quotation marks), and cover things such as the Kennedy assassination, a brief history of quantum mechanics, and race car driving. These parts are great.

Unfortunately the mystery plot of part one completely disappears, and you're left with absolutely no closure. There is a second novel coming out this month that maybe provides answers, but there are none given in this book, and really that's not what the book is interested in, for better or for worse. This book becomes completely dominated by Western's grief over Alicia's suicide (not a spoiler, it's in the first few pages) and quite frankly, it's all a huge bore. I'm not sure what exactly we're supposed to feel about a person whose sole personality trait is grief over the loss of the sister who he was in love with. Even Western's friends and acquaintances tell him over and over that he is defined by his grief, get your shit together; but then they all just more or less shrug and move on.

The book just kind of ends. If there was supposed to be some profound realization here, I must've missed it. Even the bleakness seems pretty routine. “The abyss of the past into which the world is falling,” Western thinks. “Everything vanishing as if it had never been.” It's hard not to see this as McCarthy's sunset, making a melancholic statement of how he sees the world, but honestly, that isn't very interesting. We get that kind of nihilistic doomcasting pretty much 24/7 these days; I'm confronted by the fact that I'm a passenger in this meaningless life in every other meme on Reddit. Not that there isn't anything worthwhile left to explore with this idea, but I'm a little tired of it right now.

McCarthy's prose sings as always and it's a joy to read. I know some people find his dialogue sections to be unnatural (and in this book, literally everyone is incredibly erudite), but I personally love it.

I dunno. I'm not really sure what McCarthy saw in this approach or in these characters, particularly the relationship between Western and his sister. I suspect there's a lot going on here thematically that I just didn't grasp because McCarthy is way smarter than I am, but for me, this just lacked cohesion and didn't live up to the promise of the first 100 pages. Maybe I'll change my mind after reading the second book but I'm not as excited to pick that up now, which is a huge bummer.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 5 out of 5]

One soon gets the idea that it is a story about a some salvage divers finding a crashed plane completely sealed off yet missing both a passenger and its black box, and how this alternates with a story of a woman seemingly undergoing the strangest of hallucinations. In fact that is how it begins, but it floats off in many directions and contains stories within stories, and to be honest, I spent a lot of reading time frustrated at not being able to pin down what it was really about. Despite my total confusion, which in all honesty lasted right to the end of the book, I was totally taken over by the prose, the dialoguing, the sheer beauty of it all; and also by the strange feeling that it was resonating with me. This is one I will certainly read again at sometime in the future.

[Lee]

Stars, for this? It just doesn't seem right. Some of the best paragraphs* I've read, period. Enigmatic, fascinating, mysterious, oblique, hilarious, horribly ominous. A truly unique mind / voice reconsidering the same old timeless questions, and occasionally hitting on stunning insights. Absolutely worth your time.


* Here's an example:

'There were people who escaped from 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.'

Also:

'When they left Mexico City the plane lifted up through the blue dusk into sunlight again and banked over the city and the moon dropped down the glass of the cabin like a coin falling through the sea. The summit of Popocatépetl broke through the clouds. Sunlight on the snow. The long blue shadows. The plane swung slowly north. Far below the shape of the city in its deep mauve grids like a vast motherboard. The lights had begun to come on. An edge to the dusk. Ixtaccihuatl. Dropping away. The coming darkness. The plane leveled off at twenty-seven thousand feet and headed north through the Mexican night with the stars milling in the sternway.'

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant fever dream of a novel. So many wounded souls. The mysteries of a plane, deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with a missing passenger. Food and booze in New Orleans. Muscle cars in the south. Siblings with secrets. Madness aplenty. Yup, just another Cormac McCarthy novel. I loved it. Every page.

[Cathrine ☯️ · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 🤯🤯
These thoughts come from a passenger who just lost her McCarthy virginity.
In my humble opinion, for those of you out there still intact, I suggest you save it for another book.
A little back-up from Constance Grady at Vox:

“These books are built to stand apart from the reader, to withhold, to refuse to satisfy. You can almost feel McCarthy swaggering a bit as, with great skill and elegance, he chooses time and time again to frustrate any desire the reader might have for either narrative or story.”

That said, his prose without that narrative or story still made an impact. Reading through the quotes shared on the book page, many of which I hi-lighted, speaks to that. Surely there could be an entire book of just those from his body of work.

I am grateful to have read this with a group of friends, but while there were brilliant points of light in the dark abyss, my ratings are always about the emotional impact and satisfaction reading has on my psyche and much of what McCarthy is communicating here is encrypted.
Sadly I am not up to the task of conversion.

[William Gwynne]

My BookTube review of this fantastic read - William Gwynne

I have been swiftly reminded of how unique Cormac McCarthy's writing is, and why he is often heralded as one of the greatest living writers.

The Passenger is very different to the classic McCarthy books in many ways, but at the same time it has that McCarthiness about it. That raw exploration of the human condition, with The Passenger placing particular focus on the relationship between love, regret and grief.

We follow two perspectives, both of whom are very different, but their lives are intertwined, whether or not they share each other's presence. Bobby Western is one of the greatest characters ever in my opinion. We have so many different elements of his past and present come into play that makes him feel so human and create a living character-driven story.

In The Passenger Cormac McCarthy retains some of those elements he is so famed for, but make no mistake, this is a unique story. Our protagonist embarks on a physical and emotional odyssey as he battles with grief, fear, intergenerational guilt and far more. In this we do not have the classic journey to the west. No. This is a journey into the depths of the human spirit

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

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.

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 streetcar, 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.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Octogenarian Cormac McCarthy - considered one of America's finest writers - has an eclectic oeuvre that ranges from Westerns to post-apocalyptic themes. Since 2014, McCarthy has been a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute, where researchers study complex adaptive systems. McCarthy's interest in science enhances 'The Passenger', whose main characters like to chitchat about physics, math, and more. The novel is a character-driven story with a rather elusive plot.

*****

It's the 1980s and Bobby Western - who grew up in Ohio and Tennessee, went to Caltech, and was a Formula Two race car driver in Europe - is now a salvage diver in New Orleans.



Bobby is burdened by guilt because his beautiful brilliant sister committed suicide and his physicist father helped build the atom bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Western's life goes off the rails after he and his dive partner Oiler investigate a small plane sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.

>



The plane's manifest lists ten souls, but only nine corpses are found. Moreover, the craft's black box is missing. Bobby smells a rat and his personal (secret) investigation reveals that someone left the plane before it was submerged.

After the dive, government agents with obscure credentials start harassing Bobby.



They question him, search his apartment, threaten him, invalidate his passport, and eventually seize his assets for (supposed) tax evasion. In addition, Bobby's dive partner Oiler mysteriously dies during a dive job in Venezuela. All this leaves Bobby flat broke and fearing for his life.

The story follows Bobby as he works on an oil rig; lives in an isolated hut out west; takes measures to evade the government; and so on.



In flashbacks, we learn that Bobby found buried treasure in his deceased grandmother's basement, which he shared with his adolescent, schizophrenic, math-genius sister Alicia, who's intermittently institutionalized.



Sections about Alicia are interspersed through the novel, and we find that she hallucinated an entire entourage of people, the most prominent of whom was 'The Thalidomide Kid.' The Thalidomide Kid - who had flippers and a deep reservoir of malapropisms and silly jokes - had philosophical and mathematical discussions with Alicia, and tried to persuade her to stay in school and move forward with her life. However, young Alicia couldn't cope and killed herself. Bobby, who was in love with his sister, was consumed by grief for the rest of his life.



As Bobby goes about his business, he meets with friends, acquaintances, and other people in bars, restaurants, institutions, homes, and so on. Bobby's associates include a gorgeous transgender woman;



a conman;



a lawyer;



mental patients, and others.



Western and his companions discuss all manner of subjects, including quantum mechanics; abstruse mathematics; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy; expensive violins; race car driving; life and death and grief; and more.

The book is a vehicle for McCarthy to discuss topics that interest him, which are wide-ranging and sometimes esoteric. Moreover, the mystery of the sunken plane is never resolved. Thus I'd recommend the book to readers who like pedantic literary novels.


Author Cormac McCarthy

The book has a sequel, Stella Maris, which is about Alicia's sessions with her psychiatrist.

You can follow my reviews at https://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.com

[Diane Barnes]

I'm not going to rate this book because I don't think it's rateable. Either Cormac is such a genius I can't figure out what he's trying to say, or I'm not intellectual enough to grasp his message. Or maybe there isn't one. Some of the conversations were brilliant, but they were all over the place and about every subject except the supposed plot of the book. I didn't look forward to reading this before sitting down with it every day, but on the other hand, once I started reading I was hooked.When I did finally finish, my first thought was that maybe this was a prequel to The Road. We are all passengers on a ride into oblivion.

Yes, I plan to read Stella Maris, just to see if there is any clarity there. And it's a much shorter book to grapple with, at half the page count.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.
The novel opens with a discovery, but not the submerged plane noted in all the reviews. There is a reverence here, a mournful bowing to the lost sublime. There is an eschatology on par with Melville at play.
Perhaps it is a soft four star effort. There is a sprawl to The Passenger; I divine that the project has been around for a while, perhaps decades. There’s an existential noir in the Big Easy at the heart of the novel. Such a characterization is a bit misleading as the engine of this effort is dialogue. Sure there are digressions on winter in Idaho or the rhythm of gulf waters before dawn but so much of this modernist mantelpiece is digressive banter amongst the beleaguered. There was a realization during my two day reading of this that despite my acclaim for McCarthy I don’t appear to reread him. I’m not ready to construe anything further from such an observation. I’ve already seen the citations of Edward Said and late period syndrome, the annoyance with the information dumps on astrophysics or with Vietnam, the calculating encroachment from parsing a wine list to the use of Oswald as decoy in the Kennedy assassination. I was intermittently confused but I undoubtedly enjoyed my time with The Passenger.

[luce (recovering from one big reading slump) · Rating 4 out of 5]

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“I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die.”

By turns, blunt and meandering The Passenger presents its readers with an unsparing tale permeated by existential angst. Cormac McCarthy’s prose is uncompromising: much of the narrative consists of dialogues: rambling conversations, mystifying backwards and forwards, sharp repartees, and unremitting monologues that could easily rival Dostoyevsky’s ones. The characters are preoccupied with their past, the meaning of life, human nature, war, history, particularly America’s, morality, death, with madness. Many of them are pessimistic and bitter, jaded by age and/or experience, weighted by guilt, and haunted by past choices and loves. They recount anecdotes, confess their fears and desires, and lose themselves in speculations and diatribes of a philosophical nature.

Much of the book focuses on the encounters and conversations that our aptly named protagonist, Western, a shadow of a man working as a salvage diver, makes as he traverses the Southern States and later on as he drives toward the Northwest. These talks he has, be it with strangers or old friends, are presented as if from a transcript. We are made to feel as if we were actually there, witnessing these people talk. McCarthy certainly succeeds in conveying the cadences of their speech and the kind of vocabulary they would use. Western, a good listener, often lets the other person initiate and dictate the direction of their conversation. His motives and thoughts remain somewhat of a mystery, but we can often tell what is important to him or what he feels about something by the questions or statements he chooses to dodge or elide. During his various exchanges with people he meets in bars and restaurants ​​in New Orleans and later when he has hit the road, we learn that he was in love with his sister and that his father collaborated with Oppenheimer and contributed to the atomic bomb. Haunted by his guilt, his sister’s death, and his father’s legacy, Western exists dimly.

Interested with Western’s story, are short italicized chapters in which his sister, a promising mathematician, is being belittled by her hallucinations, in particular by the one referred to as ‘the Kid’. His rambling yet frenzied voice dominates these sections, and much of what he says and does is of an absurd, nonsensical nature, on the lines of Alice in Wonderland. The sister’s voice remains absent, but whereas we ultimately come to know Western, as someone who is lonely and bereft, yet willing to let people open up about their thoughts & feelings, the sister remains an impression of a beautiful yet ‘broken’ young woman. We know she wants to die, that she is tired, that her hallucinations are a source of torment and exhaustion…but I couldn’t get a grasp on her the way I did Western. Had her chapters allowed us to hear more of her, for instance, in regards to her feelings towards her self, her family and Western, maybe then she would have come across as a more believable character.

Although there are women here and there, the novel mostly consists of the voices of men: men who feel forgotten, who are spiralling into addiction, and who view the world through grimey lenses. They share a preoccupation with questions of a philosophical nature, history, and science. They speak of war, of death, of politics. Yet, despite the depressing and often dismal mood permeating Western’s physical and metaphysical meanderings, there were many moments of wit, some really good banter, and a lot of cleverly delivered lines.
There are only echoes of Western and his sister’s relationship, as we are given brief glimpses and fragments into the forbidden feelings they felt for one another. Because of Western’s avoidance of his past, his sister is more of a quietly haunting presence.

I would be lying if I said that I understood the novel, as many passages and exchanges flew over my head. Yet, I found the writing compelling, especially McCarthy’s ear for language. The novel is certainly very atmospheric, even if the landscape we are being presented with feels desolate, an America from a bygone era. This is very much of a slow-burn of a novel, with subtle moments of introspection. Despite Western being followed by these men for unclear reasons, The Passengeris not a thriller, but rather an analytical psychodrama, where characters dispense historical, mathematical, and scientific facts left and right, all the while our central character is struck in a limbo of sorts. However, there is an obliqueness, an ambivalence, to the events that have and are transpiring that does add tension to Western's story and his past.
The narrative is quite self-aware: from a reference to Joyce, to Western's nicknames, to the idea of playing the role of the tragic hero in the story of your life. Despite the story's gritty ambience there were many moments that I found moving, endearing even. The story's exploration of grief and alienation were certainly thought-provoking and evocative. This was my first foray into McCarthy's ouevre and I am definitely planning on making my way through his backlist.



some quotes:

“You believe that the loss of those you loved has absolved you of all else.”

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”

“They’re sad. The dead are not loved long, you said. You may have noticed it in your travels, you said.”

“Good guys, bad guys. You’re all the same guys.”

“How come you never got another cat?
I just didnt want to lose anything else. I’m all lost out.”

“He was wet and chilled. Finally he stopped. What do you know of grief? he called. You know nothing. There is no other loss. Do you understand? The world is ashes. Ashes. For her to be in pain? The least insult? The least humiliation? Do you understand? For her to die alone? Her? There is no other loss. Do you understand? No other loss. None”

“In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. 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.”

“People want to be reimbursed for their pain. They seldom are.”

“You see yourself as a tragic figure.
No I dont. Not even close. A tragic figure is a person of consequence.
Which you are not.
A person of ill consequence.”

“she was right. People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.”

“A recluse in an old house. Growing stranger by the day.”

“Much has changed and yet everything is the same. I am the same. I always will be. I’m writing because there are things that I think you would like to know. I am writing because there are things I dont want to forget. Everything is gone from my life except you. I dont even know what that means. There are times when I cant stop crying. I’m sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. All my love.”

“What was it she wanted?
Come on.
No. I dont know.
She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place. She wanted to not have been. Period.”

“I think a lot of people would elect to be dead if they didnt have to die.”

“History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.”

“Okay. Are you all right?
No. Are you?
No. But we’re on reduced expectations. That helps.”

“I have a feeling that the shape of your interior life is something you believe somehow exempts you from other considerations. ”

“evil has no alternate plan. It is simply incapable of assuming failure.”

“A frail candle tottering in the darkness. All of history a rehearsal for its own extinction.”

“ Fathers are always forgiven. In the end they are forgiven. Had it been women who dragged the world through these horrors there would be a bounty on them.”

[Steve Saroff · Rating 5 out of 5]

review to follow

[Mariel · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is indulgent, meandering, and untethered in a way that too many readers will mistake for “crafty.” As if in an act of self sabotage, McCarthy refuses to engage with anything that could resemble coherent narrative or insightful commentary and instead chooses the murkier path of free association stream of consciousness, all to no real end.

McCarthy’s strength is writing about time and place, not people. I’d say that the biggest problem with this novel is that he attempts to turn away from this impulse, and instead chooses to craft a book around individuals who never really make much sense or evoke much interest. The two main characters fall into rigid over-played tropes: the silent, brooding, faceless roughneck genius who yearns for something more that the world can never give him. And the tragic schizophrenic math prodigy whose insight curses her to be wise beyond her years (and who is not faceless, I might add, because the only other essential fact about her is that she is apparently one of the most beautiful women that anyone has ever seen. Her madness, her brilliance, and her beauty are the only attributes we know about her, and are apparently all that matter. Never mind the need for things like character and personality.)

“The Passenger” is the first of a two volume set (the first novel focuses on the brooding man character, while the second will center on the prodigy — a brother and sister pair). However, McCarthy has already played much of his hand, filling the room with people who take up space and ruminate in their winding thoughts but ultimately never do or say or think anything of actual interest. The characters at the fringes of the story would carry more weight if they weren’t trying so hard to impress us.

There is nothing wrong with a nihilistic contemplation of existence and humanity. There is nothing wrong with a rejection of traditional principles of plot and storytelling for the sake of experimentation and innovation. But from the author who already gave us “Blood Meridian,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “The Road,” “The Passenger” adds nothing and, if anything, detracts from an otherwise impressive literary legacy.

[Olaf Gütte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Je weiter man beim Lesen des Romans fortschreitet,
desto mehr bekommt man den Eindruck,
dass der Titel des Buches eine gewisse Ambivalenz birgt.
Man kann auf die Fortsetzung gespannt sein.

[Matt Quann · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I came out of 2022 with a reading goal it was this: read more literary fiction and don't be afraid of any work because it might be too tough a read. This was spurred on by my reading of Hernan Diaz's superb Trust which challenged and delighted me in equal measure. So, when I found Cormac McCarthy's latest boxed set (quite attractive, by the by) under the Christmas tree I knew where my 2023 reading experience would start.

I knew going in that McCarthy is a polarizing writer and my experience with him aside from The Road was limited. I expected to be challenged, what I hadn't expected was an eminently enjoyable read. That's not to say that the novel is light: it's themes and content are threaten to drag the reader down by the gravitational pull of Bobby Western's despair. Nonetheless, it is a rich and ceaselessly interesting novel that surprised me with its ability to draw me in on a daily basis.

As for what the novel is about? One might say that Bobby Western finds a downed plane on a salvage dive, a passenger is missing, and shady government officials mill about in the background. But, truthfully, that description is misleading and if you enter this novel expecting a thriller, you'll only be disappointed. What's more apt is that The Passenger uses Bobby Western as a way to investigate existence, the subconscious, and American life. The characters populating these pages are so well realized that I waited for them to pop into my life for a chat.

What else?

The writing itself is full of all that McCarthy's detractors complain about. There are no quotation marks to denote dialogue, the dialogue itself is often difficult to attribute to a particular character, and he creates these strange compound words that mostly seem unnecessary. The pace here is slow, the loose plot is prone to divergence and tangents, and you may very well finish the book not knowing the point of it all. While I usually avoid these sorts of novels, The Passenger worked exceptionally well for me: I was drawn into the expositional passages, adored the real-to-life dialogue, and felt that the occasionally confusing and loose bits of text helped to set the atmosphere of ambiguity that pervades the novel.

Only my opinion here, but I gather that this novel is largely focused on the unconscious: there's bits that don't seem to make sense in a linear way, but feel true to the spirit of the work. There's also a hefty passage on string theory that did naught but baffle me, though you may have an easier time of it depending on your background. I'm also a quarter into the companion novel, Stella Maris and am currently under the impression that while The Passenger could work without it, Stella Maris, helps to enrich and confound its sibling novel.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed this read. I'd never call it an easy read, but it wasn't the slog that I was expecting given the talk about McCarthy. I think Blood Meridian, which I also hope to get to this year, might fill that need to suffer to appreciate the art of McCarthy. It's always a bit tough to tell what will stick with you and what will fall to the wayside, but I get the feeling that I'll be thinking about this novel until I decide to give it another go around in a few years.

[Fraser Simons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re read thoughts at the bottom:

In probably over 85% dialogue, Bobby Western, a diver mourning the loss of his sister, hounded by the government for unknown reasons, is actually seeking answers not through a typical journey—but through the alignment, or realignment of his self, through talking to a large cast of characters. And what those discussions predominantly are about fall into two camps, for the most part: Metaphysics and philosophy.

One would assume Bobby would gather himself and take on the government and unravel the reason he is being targeted, as he’s more-or-less baffled as to why. What he actually wants is to be left alone to process grief and to continue to exist off-the-grid. As he discusses a wide range of topics his “journey”, or traversal, is to circumnavigate the obstacle entirely. By way of adapting himself with the information provided to him by others who are are similar outliers. Bobby doesn’t get to help define reality—that is for those in power. Not the people who should be in charge in constructs (social or otherwise), but mostly people who simply got there first, and attempt to make everybody else play their game.

The pivotal decision, then, at least for Bobby, is whether or not to accept the conditions of the engagement put to him. This is by no means a plot driven book. The movement is in his interiority. And alternating with it is a similar, but different interiority of his sister, who is grieving. We don’t know the time and place in which the conversations she has with a construct of “the kid” take place. But again, understanding via information received is the progress of the book in these sections, too. And it falls into question further: What is reality, why do accept life as defined by our government? What happens when you do not fit in and do not accept how society functions?

As an imperative, The Passenger wants to show what the byproduct of our civilization does to dissent and dissidents. To those who poke the bear by doing nothing but existing. The intelligent and exceptional, if they can function at all, are treated as a kind of cancer. And to destroy something without understanding it is a certain kind of inhumane evil we often visit upon just about everything as a society and culture.

And so this book is about greater understanding of all things as a substation for a more traditional book with a plot and catharsis and obstacles that must be addressed as we have seen before. It raises more questions than it answers and it shows contradictions that are painful and beautiful. As each character is a foil to present Bobby with an opportunity to comprehend something he hadn’t, it is posed to the reader as a simulacrum of the experience Bobby is having.

For me, it was textured and rich even solely on audio, with fantastic performances by two narrators. I highly recommend it, as it gets into a certain rhythm that is just entrancing and commands attention in a very organic way. I am very curious what the reading experience is like, and I will be waiting for the second book in this duology very much, I have to say.
******
So, I just read it for a second time: I like it even more the second go around. I actually found that there’s more answers than I had previously remembered. The end of Western is pretty seriously codified and telegraphed. At the very start, I think it’s the tender on the diving crew? (but possibly not) says they’ve had a dream in which, paraphrased, Western was navigating the bottom and his only way out was the cutting off of all of his friends. This is right off the gun.

When the G-men show up after the dive, where a passenger is missing and he is not put in jail, but is effectively “arrested” by the IRS (and other agencies, presumably), Western begins a whistle-stop tour of those people in his orbit, so-called friends. All progress towards what his action will be is codified in those discussions. They’re comprised of outcasts and misfits themselves, and the alternating chapters with his deceased sister aid the metaphysical breakdown of his progress, as they perceive the world completely differently. Yet life, as constructed by our society, serves neither of them. She is the allegedly schizophrenic, with a chorus within her constructs as intractable as any “real” person. And the notion of ideas having traction, momentum—and a subsequent detractor, especially when it’s a persona with her mind, lead to an excitable conclusion. Just as Western does, in his own way. There is no real choice because of how things were laid out even further back than the ‘60s, when this takes place. The only choice Western really has is in the very last few sentences.