The Passenger
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3.9 • 29 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Across the world, Cormac McCarthy fans waited with bated breath for The Passenger, the first new novel from the enigmatic author since 2006’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Road. The Passenger was announced as the first of a duo, with its sequel, Stella Maris arriving a month later. The story begins with a dive team headed by Robert “Bobby” Western as they uncover the remains of a charter flight and discover something curious—the flight’s black box and a single passenger are missing. The wreck goes unreported everywhere but not unnoticed as Western quickly finds himself pursued by mysterious powers. What follows is a strange, beguiling tale of family tragedy, physics and metaphysics and the ties between people that transcend time and space, told as only McCarthy could tell it. The expansive, abstract ideas delivered in exquisitely precise prose will ensnare and delight long-term McCarthy readers. And for those who haven’t yet had the pleasure? This is the tip of the iceberg in a body of work from one of the finest American writers working today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCarthy returns 16 years after his Pulitzer-winning The Road with a rich story of an underachieving salvage diver in 1980 New Orleans, the first in a two-volume work. Bobby Western, son of a nuclear physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, is tasked with investigating a private plane crash in the Gulf. The plane's crew is dead, the black box is missing, and one passenger is unaccounted for. Soon, agents of the U.S. government begin to harass Western and his coworker, then this colleague turns up dead. This thriller narrative is intertwined with the story of Western's sister, Alicia, a mathematical genius who had schizophrenia and died by suicide. In flashbacks of Alicia's hallucinations, vaudevillian characters perform for her—most notably, a character named the Thalidomide Kid. Alicia and the Kid engage in numerous conversations about arcane philosophy, theology, and physics—staples of the philosopher-tramps, vagabonds, and sociopaths of McCarthy's canon, though their presence doesn't feel quite as thematically grounded as they do in his masterworks. Still, he dazzles with his descriptions of a beautifully broken New Orleans: "The rich moss and cellar smell of the city thick on the night air. A cold and skullcolored moon.... At times the city seemed older than Nineveh." The book's many pleasures will leave readers aching for the final installment.
Customer Reviews
Intriguing
A complex and contemplative novel that is hard to put into any category. Well worth reading and gives cause for thought about life and its purpose.
As I lay drowning (in words)
3.5 stars
Author
American novelist and playwright, now aged 89. His first nine novels were westerns or southern Gothic (he is frequently compared to Faulkner), or possibly southern gothic westerns. Blood Meridian (1985) appears on all known lists of the best American novels of the last 25, 50 or 100 years. Take your pick. My first experience of McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses (1992) was, and still remains, one of the most remarkable novels I have ever read. Harold Bloom (1930-2019), the greatest literary critic in the English speaking world, ranked McCarthy as one of the four truly great American novelists of his era, the others being Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth. The Coen Brothers movie adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) won four Academy awards. He subsequently wrote the original screenplay for The Counselor, a 2013 crime thriller film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012, and published a widely quoted essay on human unconscious and the origin of language in 2017. News that he was working on a new novel (two in fact, the second to be published a month after the first) understandably created a stir in literary circles.
Plot
In the early hours of the morning, a salvage diver enters a recently crashed small jet plane lying on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. Nine bodies are present and correct, seat belts fastened. The tenth is missing. So is the black box recorder. There follows a Kafkaesque pursuit (The Trial, specifically) of our boy by mysterious agents who keep questioning him in ways he cannot answer. He flees. They pursue him as he seeks to find his schizophrenic sister, who is actually dead having killed herself. She has a lot of hallucinations, as you might if you were dead, or almost dead. There’s a phocomelic guy named the Thalidomide Kid involved. There’s also a connection to the Manhattan Project. The diver and his sister’s father worked on it which implies the possibility of inherited genetic damage due to radiation exposure. Generational guilt too, I think, although I admit I lost touch with what Mr M was on about.
Writing
I’m paraphrasing Wikipedia here. McCarthy is not fan of punctuation, semicolons especially, but likes polysyndetons (use of ands or buts instead of commas), which slow the pace of the narrative apparently. He never uses quotation marks for dialogue because they "blot the page up with weird little marks.” His dialogue often lacks attribution too, yet he expects readers will remain “oriented as to who is speaking.” Not this little black duck. Not this time. Maybe in his earlier novels where there were mucho descriptive passages. Here those are limited to beneath the sea and there’s substantially more talking than I recall from Mr McCarthy’s earlier efforts. Add to that fragmented plot lines and shifting timeframes and it all got too much for me. Rather like Faulkner does. It’s totally my fault, of course. My brain has been ruined by reading detective novels.
Note
Apparently the upcoming companion volume, Stella Maris, is written from the POV of the aforementioned dead sister. Before she was dead presumably. Or after. Possibly both. I think I’ll pass.
Just cause it’s McCarthy
When Madonna releases a new song, it goes to top ten. But you think, if a new artist had released this it wouldn’t rate. I’ve read final year high school students exam pieces better than this. “Esteemed” reviewers seem too afraid to mention that the emperor has no clothes on.