The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy is one of my favourite authors. The Road might be my personal favourite book, and Blood Meridian and No Country For Old Men are not too far behind. I was really saddened to hear of his recent passing, and it pushed me to finish this book sooner than later.

I picked up The Passenger shortly after it was released last year, and I was excited to read a book of his upon its release. It starts off with a pretty intriguing premise, but it quickly becomes sort of aimless musings that I didn't completely connect with. There are some effective conversions and I just like the cadence and tone in which McCarthy writes, but I had a hard time focusing on this book which is why it took me 6+ months to finish.

I'm still interested in the follow up to this book, and digging more into McCarthy's backlog, but I'm hoping for more next time.

This is one of those books that I know I'll be reading multiple times and that leaving a conventional “review” for won't be possible.

The Passenger is presented through two different, alternating vantage points. First is through the hallucinations of Alicia, a certified genius in math, violins and a great deal of theoretical things. The other is Bobby Western, the brother of Alicia and, while smart in his own right, could never quite live up to his little sister. That didn't matter to him, though, because he loved his little sister. When I say loved, I don't mean sibling-wise; I mean... yeah. There are vague allusions to a quasi wedding ceremony, malformed babies and the hurt his family suffered because of all of this.

If this was the path of inciting incidents that led to Alicia checking herself into therapy, where she received shock treatments and hallucinated the Thalidomide Kid, almost described like a penguin, who would interrogate Alicia, berate her, and bring about a cast of crude “entertainers” to keep her company.

Bobby sees the Thalidomide Kid once when he closed himself up in a shack by the beach.

If you want to, you could read deeper into a lot of this, including McCarthy's use of language and his own reading into the Kekule Problem. McCarthy isn't a normal guy. He's one of the most acclaimed American authors and he can waltz into the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank where he's spent a lot of his recent years pondering language, mathematics and philosophy. This book is well researched, delving into complex mathematic theories, other times the Kennedy Assassination or the history of the atomic bombs. Western's dad was one of the creators of the atomic bomb, and his papers were stolen while Bobby was “away” after an accident.

It's understanding these things that helps to unravel what this book is. There's a plane crash at the beginning and Bobby is a salvage diver, working with a motley crew of rejects to take whatever job comes their way. One of those jobs is this crash, and there's a missing body, black box and no sign of forced entry. After this, things just seem to keep getting more complicated and worse.

We learn Bobby found a small fortune in vintage coins stuffed into pipes in the concrete foundation of his grandparents' old home. Alicia and he split that fortune, with Alicia buying a very expensive violin with her half, and Bobby buying a sports car and trotting around the globe doing various things, including being a pretty good race car driver. But what Bobby can't shake is that Alicia killed herself. She was always the smarter one, but she was also the active one.

She had checked herself into the asylum, had always known what she wanted to do, what she wanted to be. She was sought after by violin collectors to give the history and math behind antique violins. Everything about Alicia was active while Bobby drifted around, unsure of himself or his life. There's something here about Bobby's parents and their link to the atomic bombs and the sin that comes with being the offspring of such an atrocity.

The feds are after Bobby. On the surface it's about tax evasion, but there's something deeper here at play. Is Bobby the missing body from the aircraft at the beginning? Did Bobby ever really wake up after his accident and his mind is playing through his own guilt in a much more straightforward way than Alicia did?

One key here is perhaps the Thalidomide Kid himself. Thalidomide was a drug used in the 50s and 60s for pregnant women to help with morning sickness, and the results were horrific. It led to limb and liver deformities in babies that were born, or it led to miscarriages. Their limbs would resemble flippers.

Bobby encounters a host of different characters from his diving buddies, most of which meet untimely ends, to bar friends and even the glamorous trans stripper, Debbie. Debbie feels like something more, especially considering when it comes down to it, she's who Bobby trusts the most. The feds are doing everything in their power to strip Bobby's identity away from him, to where he feels like he needs to take a new identity at the hands of a lawyer he found in the phone book and has had a series of metaphysical conversations with at a mobster restaurant, and Debbie is his choice of confidant before he leaves.

Can you live your life if the past is anchored to your ankles and dragging you down? Most of his diving friends are listless and afraid of letting go of something, and their ends are not poetic. Be it living in a run-down shack shooting roaches, drowning on a job or having a lifestyle catch up, each one gave Bobby insight into what his life could be, but he can't quite accept any of them.

This is a dense, interesting, frustrating and at times very funny book that I know I'm gonna re-visit soon. It also means I need to read Stella Maris, then re-evaluate this one. I'm glad we got this book.

Enjoyed it a lot. The 4 stars is because it is really just half a book. [b:Stella Maris 60526802 Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2) Cormac McCarthy https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1658241766l/60526802.SX50.jpg 95478000] is the other half. The end is not the end. Lots of stuff unresolved. He just lifted his foot off the gas, pushed in the clutch, and is changing gears (books).McCarthy's writing style poses a few problems until you get used to it: lack of quotes (occasionally confusing, but no worse than Austen or Joyce), idiosyncratic apostrophization (contractions, foreign words), shifting stream of consciousness (a little confusing during when encountering first hallucinations, but you figure out the pattern), shifting timeline, large history of science and math info dumps (I rather enjoyed these actually since I was already familiar the subjects and there were no cringe worthy errors that I find all too common with other authors).Characters were weird but engaging. Language and view verging on poetic. There is a mystery involved, which is left hanging at the end of this volume. (Hence the “half a book” comment.) But I wonder if the mystery is not really the point, similar to the “mystery” in [b:The Brothers Karamazov 4934 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934.SX50.jpg 3393910].

Alicia: The schizophrenic discussions are conversations with the unconscious.
She's a mathematical genius. She can't explain why. She knows math but doesn't know what math is or where it comes from in the mind. The thalidomide kid and the others can't communicate fully to her in the same way as Kekule dream supposedly gifted him the structure of a benzene ring.

Bobby: a man growing up in the atomic age. He's grappling with everything that entails and his own struggles with purpose. He lost his sister and the love of his life. He's lost, confused, shut off from love, has abandoned science. He can't live without Alicia and not living means no more Alicia.
There's something about quantum entanglement here.