THE PASSENGER - CORMAC MCCARTHY

I wasn’t going to read this one, the first in a two part series, until I came across a review claiming the book was “too bleak” which piqued my interest. McCarthy is just about the bleakest contemporary writer I know of, so if one of his books is bumming out a professional reviewer, it’s probably up my alley. I would say I’m a medium to strong McCarthy fan. I’ve read Blood Meridian and Suttre, both of which I consider perfect classics (BM is one of the top 20 books I’ve ever read and the ultimate Western, I agree with Bloom that it basically renders the genre “finished”), as well as The Road, No Country for Old Men and part of Child of God (which I should revisit) so I think I’ve read enough to definitely say that you don’t go to McCarthy for feel-good vibes. And The Passenger fits firmly in this camp, it is certainly gloomy and a bummer. As a late work, and McCarthy is in his mid-80s so who knows how many more we’re going to get, The Passenger does a great job merging the two major strains of his work. Much of the early McCarthy takes place in Appalachia or the south and has more of a Southern Gothic and at times funny-in-a-grotesque-way feel while the later stuff takes place in the America West on the Border with Mexico and features the tropes and themes you’d expect from that landscape. The Passenger has a main character named Billy Western who spends most of his time in Tennessee and New Orleans, and who, like the main character is NCfOM, gets himself involved in something malevolent that is much larger than him. In this case, Billy is a salvage diver who finds a downed plane in the Gulf of Mexico that seems to be missing a passenger and appears to have been tampered with. He’s then followed by government agents of some sort who think he knows something he’s not supposed to. His father helped create the atomic bomb, which seems to put him under extra scrutiny and he spends most of the book fleeing (ending up in Ibiza, before it’s a rich people party island) these shadowy forces. He spends his time speaking with his dead-beat buddies (including a trans figure who, I found, very sympathetically drawn and well-conceived. You hear that an 80-something year old YT guy author is going to try to write a trans character and you hold your breath) in sections that really reminded me of the best parts of Suttre. Like in Suttre, they bluster and joke, but ultimately commiserate that they don’t understand life at all. He also spends his time missing his dead sister, who he is clearly in love with, Alicia, who was beautiful, a physics genius and profoundly mentally unwell. The book is interspersed with all italics sections that recreated the sister’s hallucinations, which involve grotesque “entertainments” and spectacles but largely revolve around her conversations with a character called “The Thalidomide Kid” or just “The Kid.” This is significant for two reasons, first, “The Kid” is the only name given to the main character in Blood Meridian, so it seems insane to not consider that McCarthy is asking us to connect them (added to this, at one point the book directly calls him a Djinn, which is often how the other main character in Blood Meridian, The Judge, is described). Additionally, the book is partially obsessed with the power of science to do evil, Billy and Alicia’s father’s work on the Atomic bomb comes up often and at one point McCarthy refers to “Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.” So naming a demonic figure after a drug, Thalidomide, that was developed by Nazi war-criminals who had escaped justice since they were deemed “useful” to the West and went on to hideously deformed 10,000-20,000 people seems very much in keeping with this theme. McCarthy is famous for spending all of his time these days at the Santa Fe institute, talking to scientists so he seems particularly tuned into their capacity for evil. As a final aside, I was also intrigued that this book contains a large, ~20pg section about the Kennedy assassination. His take isn’t wild or anything, he blames the Mafia, especially Carlos Marcello, and the CIA but it does strike me as interesting that, like Bob Dylan, he’s bringing up that killing at the end of his life. Prehaps people of that age have a good sense now of what was lost and how badly we, the USA, have fucked ourselves and the rest of the world by not really getting to the bottom of that event. Overall, I really enjoyed it, where else are you going to get lines like, “Life. What can you say? It’s not for everyone.”