The Passenger (2022)

by Cormac McCarthy

The environment is more than the backdrop of a McCarthy story: it is the beating heart. His narratives vibrate to the rhythm of the natural world in which they are set. Child of God, forgotten Appalachian hollows. Blood Meridian, the atavistic desert. The Road and its ashen afterworld.

The Passenger’s affinity is with the sea. It takes place primarily in New Orleans and follows a salvage diver, Bobby Western, through the murky depths of the surrounding waters. It’s tempestuous and indiscriminate and blue. Loss and impermanence are salient themes as supporting characters are snuffed out and Bobby self-flagellates over the fading memory of his muse.

Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood. He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one. The reefs seemed to move slowly in the last hours and the late colors of the sun drained away and then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night.

Nominally, there’s a plot involving a drowned plane, fiendish federal agents, and the atomic bomb. These elements may steer the story, but they aren’t the story; the story is of Bobby’s grief and its development. It’s told in a disorganized collection of painstakingly detailed conversations on topics ranging from Formula Two racing to particle physics to Kennedy’s assassination, conversations darkening in tone as the apparatus of the state tightens around Bobby.

The truth is that everyone is under arrest. Or soon will be. They dont have to restrict your movements. They just have to know where you are.

Bobby’s persecution loudly echoes Kafka’s The Trial (1925), and stylistically the works share the same loosely-woven, incomplete quality. In The Passenger, chapters are punctuated by rambling, schizophrenic italicized interludes that aren’t wholly amusing or asinine, but something in between. Certain scenes seem to serve purely as pretext for McCarthy to flex his mastery. Beginner-friendly, it is not.

The reader concludes with a detailed understanding of the inner life of the protagonist and his past but little insight into how everything is connected. Were it a standalone book, I’d say that’s the point — like crashing waves, the tireless and insensate machinations of a malevolent government aren’t to be fought against, but maneuvered around when possible and submitted to when not.

Thankfully, The Passenger isn’t a standalone book. Without resorting to a device so dramatic as a cliffhanger, McCarthy has successfully half-told a story that has me impatiently awaiting its conclusion in Stella Maris next month.

It’s truly a surprise and a pleasure to be taking part in an active literary sensation in 2022. Who knew this was still possible?