The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
385 pages, Hardcover
October 2022 by Knopf Publishing Group
Cormac McCarthy is an odd chap. I performed an experiment when I was reading this book at work. I asked my younger co-workers who are not book nerds if they knew who Cormac was, they didn’t expect the one tried to hide her phone so I wouldn’t know that she googled him. I saw that.
I thought an author that won the Pulitzer prize or been an Oprah book club pick was known to them. Nope, It is the Hollywood takes of The Road and No Country for Old Men that they had heard of. The first of two new Cormac McCarthy books came as a surprise to his fans and the literary community alike as many thought he was done. I personally decided I was reading them even if they had the most generic as hell covers. Seriously the dude is an American treasure maybe spend more than fifteen minutes on the cover work.
I think most reading my blog know who McCarthy is and what he does, but just in case let me talk about what he means to me personally. I first read Cormac McCarthy for a pretty silly reason. Lost to time I was sitting talking with a group of writers talking about the most disturbing books they ever read. I don’t remember who but somebody said Blood Meridian. I would like to say that I was already aware of this 1985 Western classic but I wasn’t.
A few days later I was in the now defunct Borders in San Diego, where I first met Rob famously of Mysterious Galaxy now. I saw The Road being advertised for pre-orders. A post-apocalypse novel? OK, I gotta read this guy’s stuff. If you don’t know Blood Meridian is a very experimental novel, and grammar is almost non-existent. It gives the novel a bizarro-nightmare light surreal feel that is unlike any other novel. The reading experience is unlike anything else. The Road is more traditional except that if my memory serves me McCarthy breaks the rules by not naming the two main characters.
That is the thing, the dude is a treasure in part because he doesn’t give fuck about the rules, and somehow the novels and stories still manage to work. I can’t imagine trying to edit him. It would impossible to know what were mistakes and intentional. In that sense reading The Passenger is a slow experience because the text mostly doesn’t follow the rules. Mostly.
The dialogue has no quotation marks and fewer speech tags. Oddly the times when the prose was more traditionally formatted it was during hallucinations, and surreal and loosey-goosey during the moments actually happened in the story. I admit I didn’t figure that out until very late in the book, and many times I thought the book was doing things it wasn’t.
McCarthy and The Passenger are not for everyone. This novel is more about mood than plot. In a sense, it is a historical novel, flirting with the story of J Robert Oppenheimer and a fictional son. Or one of our lead characters Bobby Western a deep sea diver that believes he is the son of the father of the atomic bomb. It is possible that I am misreading this plot, but like I said we are chasing vibe. If four hundred pages of vibe and unreliable narrators are not your thing move on.
The feelings in this novel are deep, there are a series of flashbacks to childhood, I don’t want to color anyone’s reading of this but these chapters appear to be a character accounting for a childhood that is leaving the narrator hopeless and waiting to die…
“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.”
The narrative cuts back and forth with the Bobby Western story that appears at first to be a mystery about a sunken plane and if the people on the plane were murdered. It is interesting because McCarthy builds up a little mystery there and proceeds to basically never solve it. The crashed plane went under the ocean, everyone is dead, one person is missing and we never really learn how that happened.
That is not the point, the suspicion of Bobby, and the many conversations are more the point. That is why you’ll see a few reviewers say this is pointless. At 89 years Cormac McCarthy sure as fuck is not writing a book without a point just because some nitwit with a Goodreads account and MFA degree in progress doesn’t get it, doesn't make it so.
There are many points to this book and I am not going to pretend I understand all of them, or got them right away. That is one of the many points sailing over the heads of some readers. I mean this book is loaded with glorious asides. The most powerful of which as about Oppenheimer and the bomb.
“A lot of smart people thought he was possibly the smartest man God ever made. Odd Chap that God.”
That made me laugh, I think it was a smart tonal thing before the man who has written some of the most disturbing passages in literature writes about the atomic bomb.
“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 after ground, 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.”
Holy shit. This chapter was worth the experience of reading this book alone. This is the kind of dark artistic beauty goth and metal bands spend careers chasing. Pointless my ass.
Also, the dialogue was amazing. There are tons of rules for writing dialogue. Some of the best who ever did it, whether Elmore Leonard in books or Tarantino in film have to follow a certain pace. An underrated skill of writing is that requires leaving information out. Suggesting what characters are thinking and not saying is as important as what they say.
It is hard to break the rules and still have effective dialogue. Gregory Macdonald's Fletch novels are the best example of this. Weird as it sounds many of the interrogation scenes felt like Fletch novels to me. You see Macdonald doesn't break up long scenes of dialogue to explain the room, he doesn't bother with speech tags, which becomes the reader's job. McCarthy doesn't strike me as a Fletch fan but the dialogue in this book feels equally great at times.
Take this scene for example. No quotation marks...so I would add any but the following dialogue is as is in the book. and here is the editor's nightmare. Let's break it down.
You don’t know who we are.
I don’t care who you are.
And why is that?
Good guys, bad guys you’re all the same guys.
Are we now.
You are now.
This is great dialogue but why is there no question after you don't know who we are but there is one after and why is that? No question after Are we now... I swear I typed that exactly as it was.
“It’s just that sometimes I think I would have found my life pretty funny if I hadn’t had to live it.”
Cormac McCarthy is a master but his books are not for everyone. I admit I changed my ranking my first thought, was four stars, but like many good books, it took me a little time to process it. He is a singular writer and everything we get from him is important. So apparently there is a second part maybe there is a solution to the mystery, maybe or maybe not. I will read it.
