A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine.
THE PASSENGER is unexpected. It’s the funniest McCarthy I’ve ever read – like he sat down, cracked his knuckle and said, fuck you, Pynchon, DeLillo and all your crowd, this is the real music. The book is, by turns, fucking hilarious, tragic, scary, fascinating, heartbreaking and just plain weird.
The Kid was at the window looking out at the raw cold. The snowy park and the frozen lake beyond. Well, he said. Life. What can you say? It’s not for everybody.
Bobby Western is a deep sea diver who’s hired to survey a sunken passenger plane. When he gets inside it, he finds one passenger and the plane’s navigational console missing. You think you’re getting a conspiracy thriller. You’re not. The missing person and the missing navigational gear are the metaphor. This is the story of a man who lost his way, and a man who was in love with his sister: a genius mathematician with severe mental issues who killed herself. This is all sometime in the early 1980s.
Just his daily list of things to do. Pick up cleaning. Call mother. Fuck chickens.
Occasionally, conspiracy thriller tropes rise – and, strangely, whenever they do, the book loses juice. I have seen that people were unhappy that this is essentially a plotless novel. Do not listen to them. This is a book about spooky action at a distance. It is a book of encounters and conversations on a dizzying array of topics, and those conversations are so compelling that you won’t want a conventional plot.
Sometimes you get the sense that McCarthy believes the Twentieth Century actually ended in the 1980s and we just didn’t notice.
I should also note that the Western’s father worked with Oppenheimer on the bomb, and that plays into a lot of what happens.
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.
It is intercut with the experiences of his lost sister, Alice, with her cohort of recurring hallucinations. These two threads tangle together towards the end in an entirely surprising way. It is, in lots of ways, a novel of the unexpected, but also one of circularity and inevitability. It had me riveted, and I think it’s a small final triumph, the perfect descending note at the end of an amazing life.