It’s 1980 and a small plane crashes into the ocean killing all nine passengers aboard. But when salvage diver Robert Western enters the underwater plane, he finds only eight bodies. Then men in black start showing up to ask him: what did he see down there? Did he take anything from the wreckage? And does he believe in aliens…
The Passenger is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel since The Road in 2006 and, like buses, after waiting for ages more than one shows up at the same time - the other half of this story, Stella Maris, is being published just a few weeks from now.
I really enjoyed No Country for Old Men, both the novel and the movie, the latter of which is a cinematic masterpiece, but not much else by McCarthy - The Road and The Counsellor were both terrible, I tried and gave up on Blood Meridian (supposedly his magnum opus) and All the Pretty Horses, and I didn’t think much of his latest, The Passenger, either. I don’t think this writer is for me.
SPOILERS ahoy!
The Passenger has a very meandering, pointless narrative. The premise above only really describes a small portion of the novel. The government suits show up throughout to ask questions and continually hound Western, but nothing further happens regarding the surviving passenger - who they are, where the plane was going, why it crashed, why the government is so interested; it all gets ignored entirely. It’s basically a red herring.
Because that passenger isn’t really the titular character. I think Western is the passenger, in a metaphorical sense. The story is about him dealing with the grief of losing his beloved younger sister Alicia, who, after leaving the Stella Maris mental institution, commits suicide. Most of the narrative focuses on Western drifting through his life - whereas once, before she killed herself, he had drive and agency, now he is passive, like a passenger, letting life take him where it will; he doesn’t care anymore.
Which is an unfortunate choice because when it was about the literal passenger? It was a pretty fun story. Then McCarthy abandons that thread to fill the book with so much dead-end dross that it killed any interest I had in what was going on - not that much does. In place of a substantive thriller story we get Western sitting down with a string of random people to have conversations about random subjects: Vietnam, the JFK assassination, the life story of a transwoman, and an excruciatingly dull section on physics, to name a few.
One character called John Sheddan talks many times throughout and extensively about nothing, in a pretentious manner like a caricature of a southern gentleman, as does Kline, the private investigator who advises Western once his legal troubles begin. No idea what Western’s dad being involved in the Manhattan Project had to do with anything either - just more padding?
On the one hand, these digressions seem to serve no purpose - either in relation to the missing passenger or Western’s grief - but, on the other, as irrelevant as they are, they’re among the best passages in the book(definitely not the physics part though). The JFK assassination part is especially good, and I’d recommend Oliver Stone’s enthralling 2021 documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass if this section peaks your interest.
McCarthy’s also not doing anything impressive in his portrait of a grieving brother. Western gets sad and mopes around. He goes here, he goes there, he talks to this person, he talks to that person - he’s sad the whole time. Because - get this! - people get sad when they lose loved ones. Wow. That’s… obvious. So obvious in fact that it seems ludicrous to write a novel about something so ordinary that says nothing that anyone wouldn’t already know from simply being alive.
Each chapter opens with a few pages told in flashback from the perspective of Western’s crazy sister Alicia, who’s also a genius, where she’s talking to imaginary creatures. I didn’t understand the point of these parts either - we understand from other characters that she was mentally ill, probably schizophrenic, and these sections underline that, again and again. Do we need the repetition? Particularly as they’re not entertaining to read either.
There’s so much about this book that’s superfluous, it makes me wonder if the story could’ve been one book instead of two. I guess publishing’s still a business, eh? Gotta make money somehow. And maybe the missing passenger storyline gets resolved in the next book? Because, even though it’s called Stella Maris, the name of the mental hospital Alicia was committed to, there wasn’t any indication here that there was anything unresolved about that part of the story that requires another entire book to delve into. I think we got plenty about all of that in this one.
Like many of his books, The Passenger is filled with lots of dialogue and, to be totally fair to McCarthy, much of it is good - it sounds realistic and you buy the authenticity of it (maybe too much in the case of the physics discussion). As usual, he doesn’t go in for your fancypants big city quotation marks or apostrophes, or any indication of who’s speaking (he said, she said, Western said, etc.) so it’s not uncommon to speed through an exchange and lose the thread of who’s speaking. But that’s usually only the case in the conversations that don’t matter (ie. most of them) because in the more engaging dialogues, McCarthy gives the characters’ voices enough nuance so that you can tell which one is Western and which is the other person.
The overall effect of the novel is of a half-baked idea filled out with a lot of unrelated nonsense. Like McCarthy knew that writing about a brooding man wouldn’t sell by itself and he had all these dialogues he’d written about random topics so decided to sprinkle these throughout to liven things up.
The novel starts well, the dialogue throughout is very strong and the occasional conversational deviation is compelling but too much of it was tediously rambling, vague and ultimately unimpressive in what McCarthy was driving at. I’ll finish out the series by reading Stella Maris when it’s published but my expectations for it are way down there after reading The Passenger and I’d caution anyone thinking about picking this one up not to expect anything special either. If you’ve never read it before, or want to get a flavour of the heights this author can achieve, I recommend checking out No Country for Old Men instead of this trying snorefest.
Because that passenger isn’t really the titular character. I think Western is the passenger, in a metaphorical sense. The story is about him dealing with the grief of losing his beloved younger sister Alicia, who, after leaving the Stella Maris mental institution, commits suicide. Most of the narrative focuses on Western drifting through his life - whereas once, before she killed herself, he had drive and agency, now he is passive, like a passenger, letting life take him where it will; he doesn’t care anymore.
Which is an unfortunate choice because when it was about the literal passenger? It was a pretty fun story. Then McCarthy abandons that thread to fill the book with so much dead-end dross that it killed any interest I had in what was going on - not that much does. In place of a substantive thriller story we get Western sitting down with a string of random people to have conversations about random subjects: Vietnam, the JFK assassination, the life story of a transwoman, and an excruciatingly dull section on physics, to name a few.
One character called John Sheddan talks many times throughout and extensively about nothing, in a pretentious manner like a caricature of a southern gentleman, as does Kline, the private investigator who advises Western once his legal troubles begin. No idea what Western’s dad being involved in the Manhattan Project had to do with anything either - just more padding?
On the one hand, these digressions seem to serve no purpose - either in relation to the missing passenger or Western’s grief - but, on the other, as irrelevant as they are, they’re among the best passages in the book(definitely not the physics part though). The JFK assassination part is especially good, and I’d recommend Oliver Stone’s enthralling 2021 documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass if this section peaks your interest.
McCarthy’s also not doing anything impressive in his portrait of a grieving brother. Western gets sad and mopes around. He goes here, he goes there, he talks to this person, he talks to that person - he’s sad the whole time. Because - get this! - people get sad when they lose loved ones. Wow. That’s… obvious. So obvious in fact that it seems ludicrous to write a novel about something so ordinary that says nothing that anyone wouldn’t already know from simply being alive.
Each chapter opens with a few pages told in flashback from the perspective of Western’s crazy sister Alicia, who’s also a genius, where she’s talking to imaginary creatures. I didn’t understand the point of these parts either - we understand from other characters that she was mentally ill, probably schizophrenic, and these sections underline that, again and again. Do we need the repetition? Particularly as they’re not entertaining to read either.
There’s so much about this book that’s superfluous, it makes me wonder if the story could’ve been one book instead of two. I guess publishing’s still a business, eh? Gotta make money somehow. And maybe the missing passenger storyline gets resolved in the next book? Because, even though it’s called Stella Maris, the name of the mental hospital Alicia was committed to, there wasn’t any indication here that there was anything unresolved about that part of the story that requires another entire book to delve into. I think we got plenty about all of that in this one.
Like many of his books, The Passenger is filled with lots of dialogue and, to be totally fair to McCarthy, much of it is good - it sounds realistic and you buy the authenticity of it (maybe too much in the case of the physics discussion). As usual, he doesn’t go in for your fancypants big city quotation marks or apostrophes, or any indication of who’s speaking (he said, she said, Western said, etc.) so it’s not uncommon to speed through an exchange and lose the thread of who’s speaking. But that’s usually only the case in the conversations that don’t matter (ie. most of them) because in the more engaging dialogues, McCarthy gives the characters’ voices enough nuance so that you can tell which one is Western and which is the other person.
The overall effect of the novel is of a half-baked idea filled out with a lot of unrelated nonsense. Like McCarthy knew that writing about a brooding man wouldn’t sell by itself and he had all these dialogues he’d written about random topics so decided to sprinkle these throughout to liven things up.
The novel starts well, the dialogue throughout is very strong and the occasional conversational deviation is compelling but too much of it was tediously rambling, vague and ultimately unimpressive in what McCarthy was driving at. I’ll finish out the series by reading Stella Maris when it’s published but my expectations for it are way down there after reading The Passenger and I’d caution anyone thinking about picking this one up not to expect anything special either. If you’ve never read it before, or want to get a flavour of the heights this author can achieve, I recommend checking out No Country for Old Men instead of this trying snorefest.
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