Book Review : Cormac McCarthy - The Passenger (2022)
If all that I loved in the world is gone what difference does it make if I’m free to go to the grocery store (p.360)One can only admire the extreme creative integrity of Cormac McCarthy. In 2006, he published post-apocalyptic novel The Road and inflicted an exquisite terror upon collective consciousness and instead of basking in his well-earned glory, he disappeared for fifteen years to work on the now mythical The Passenger. A novel that very much became his Chinese Democracy. No one thought it would ever exist. But it does now and it’s predictably awesome in the stark and understated and complicated way Cormac McCarthy’s novels are awesome.
The Passenger tells the story of a man named Bobby Western, who works as a salvage diver in New Orleans. He’s not affiliated with the police or anything like that. The company he works for is mostly hired by private parties to retrieve underwater cargo. When he is contracted to retrieve a crashed plane full of bodies, Western’s fragile balance starts coming undone and the (psychological) ghost of his beloved sister Alicia starts taking too much room in his otherwise quiet, unassuming existence.
Being the passenger
According to The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy, he started working on this novel in 1980. That’s two full years before I was born. I would normally praise the discipline and the passion required to stick with a project for forty-two years, but upon reading The Passenger it seems clear that Cormac McCarthy had no idea what it was about. That he just felt compelled to tell the story of a man who is a passenger in the life of others. I don’t think there’s any grand thematic design behind it.
I mean, that’s cool. That makes The Passenger what it is : the story of meaningful moments in the life of a man who has lost all sense of meaning after the suicide of his sister. Family, friendships, conversations, passion, random bursts of inexplicable hostility, all the bearings of what makes someone socially. Bobby Western’s life is coming undone and heading towards death, but so is everyone else. In fact, the more Bobby loses people in The Passenger, the more his life is coming undone and the closer he gets to death.
Because his life gradually loses meaning when there’s less and less people to share it with. It’s not as much the plane full of bodies that begin Western’s tailspin as it is the passing of his friend Oiler (which can be correlated with the plane crash). The beauty of The Passenger lies in its absence of grandiose ambition. It is a collection of everyday magic and everyday tragedies. Cormac McCarthy, who we all assume is infinitely wise, is telling us there is no grand design to existence.
It is rather an infinite darkness that we keep illuminating for ourselves through small moments of humanity. There’s a sad, quiet beauty in this surrender of power and meaning.
It wasnt just the quantum dice that disturbed Einstein. It was the whole underlying notion. The indeterminacy of reality itself. He’d read Shopenhauer when he was young but he felt that he’d outgrown him. Now here he was back - or so some would say - in the form of an inarguable physical theory (p. 147)The Crushing Weight of History
One particular detail that makes Bobby Western (and his sister) interesting is that their father worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb. The transcendent force of the twentieth century. Nothing they can do or be can overcome the weight of their father’s actions. They are condemned to meaninglessness. Most of us are, but we’re not aware as to why or how. Without the love of his sister to give meaning to his life, Western knows he’s the inconsequential baby of the atomic bomb guy.
I believe this is what prompts his interest in the many topics he discusses in detail in The Passenger. Metaphysics, science, philosophy, history, etc. If you’re not into your novels breaking up for egghead conversation for several pages, you might hate this. Western has this powerful drive to try and understand what are the historical forces that made him who is and it expressed itself in The Passenger into intellectual pursuits that may or may not be your jam.
But if you don’t like these, I’m not sure Cormac McCarthy novels are for you. The man loves to talk about life and whatnot.
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Unsurprisingly enough, I fucking loved The Passenger. Over the epic span of forty-two years, Cormac McCarthy managed to create a translucent, universal character who is charming, resourceful, but feels terminally incomplete like most people on Earth and narrates his undoing in a grand nihilistic metaphor for the vacuity of existence. McCarthy captured the frustration and heartbreak of getting old and seeing all that has meaning for you getting wiped away. A masterful novel.
