Passenger movie11/9/2023 “I don’t know if it actually explains anything,” he says. Quantum mechanics, he feels, can only take us so far. He became familiar with protons and quarks, leptons and string theory, but gave up his calling for a life of blue-collar drifting. Western, in his youth, studied physics himself. Their father was a noted nuclear physicist who helped split the atom, leading to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Western and Alicia, we learn, are children of the bomb. ![]() ![]() This novel plays out as a great dying fall. As a storyteller, though, I suspect that he is deliberately winding down, wrapping up. The bonfire leaning in the sea wind the burning bits of brush hobbling away up the beach. His writing is potent, intoxicating, offsetting luxuriant dialogue with spare, vivid descriptions. On a prose level, McCarthy – now 89 – continues to fire on all cylinders. They materialise at her bedside whenever she skips her meds. Alicia likens these demons to a troupe of penny-dreadful entertainers. Along the way it introduces us to her nightmarish hallucinations: “the Thalidomide Kid and the old lady with the roadkill stole and Bathless Grogan and the dwarves and the Minstrel Show”. But it also casts back through the decades, mining his quasi-incestuous bond with his suicidal sister, Alicia. Ostensibly the narrative sees Western pinballing around early 80s New Orleans, hobnobbing with the locals, trying to outflank his enemies. We’re constantly bumping into dark objects and wondering what they mean. So this is a book without guardrails, an invitation to get lost. Small wonder, then, that this family tragedy feels filleted, part of a larger whole and trailing so many loose ends that it requires a self-styled “coda” – a second novel, Stella Maris, published in November – to complete the story. McCarthy began work on The Passenger back in the mid-1980s, before his career-making Border trilogy building it piecemeal and revisiting it down the years. Western’s troubles, we realise, are altogether closer to home. Except that this may be a red herring we’re still in the book’s shallows. The plane carried eight passengers but one appears to be missing and the subsequent investigation hints at a government cover-up. Inside the fuselage, he picks his way past the floating detritus and the glassy-eyed victims, still buckled in their seats. ![]() Some 40 feet below the surface, Western explores a downed charter jet. Every novel, said Iris Murdoch, is the wreck of a perfect idea. It’s by turns muscular and maudlin, immersive and indulgent. McCarthy’s generational saga covers everything from the atomic bomb to the Kennedy assassination to the principles of quantum mechanics. Published a full 16 years after the Pulitzer prize-winning The Road, The Passenger is like a submerged ship itself a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled noir thriller. He asks: “You ever bump into something down there that you didn’t know what it was?” His colleagues are blase but experience has taught him to take care. He’s kicking up clouds in the clay-coloured water and pressing further into the unknown with every weighted step. ![]() Western works as a salvage diver in the Mexican Gulf, tending to sunken barges and stricken oil rigs. It’s the depth of the darkness that spooks Bobby Western, the haunted man at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s extraordinary new novel.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |