“But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
A late novel, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger” reads almost like a retrospective. The book compiles themes the author has addressed throughout his career, striving to offer some summation. The barfly bohemians of “Suttree” recur. We also find the isolation of “The Crossing,” the trapping and skinning of “The Orchard Keeper,” “The Road”‘s keening sense of a world lost, all compiled into a single elegy.
The plot of the book involves a deep-sea diver mourning his lost sister, who was a genius, a schizophrenic, a suicide. But the plot is just the framework. Sure, the early sections of the book offer a sense that something sinister may be going on. We open with a mysterious plane crash, and our protagonist, Bobby Western, feels hunted in the sections that follow, from his favorite haunt in New Orleans to drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
But the bulk of the book explores Bobby’s relationship with his sister. Because he’s a physicist, and she was a brilliant mathematician (their dad helped develop the atom bomb), their relationship also serves as a framework to explore the nature of time and causality.
As it develops, the book elaborates on the power of observation. Things are changed by being observed, physics tells us. But the modern world has also placed us all under observation, McCarthy seems to argue.
When Bobby runs into legal trouble–tax issues–he observes the difficulty of leaving the grid, even back in the book’s setting of 1980. Her sister is constantly observed by a circus of monstrous phantoms, foul-mouthed characters that represent her madness in alternating sections of the book. The biggest question, though, is what their relationship might have been without anyone else to observe and judge. She loved him, romantically, the book states, and he remains haunted by her, how things were, how they might have been.
“The Passenger” is a beautiful read, and often challenging, particularly in the sections where Bobby’s sister is visited by her madness. (McCarthy indulges his propensity for extravagant formulations here. The sentences are thick, and the obscure words–penetralium, heresiarch–pile up.)
Also challenging is McCarthy’s partiality for “outlaw” types, a soft spot I don’t share. Large portions of the novel are dedicated to conversations with erudite, outrageous men, the kind of dudes who steal pharmaceuticals and sleep with underage girls, all while elaborating on their philosophy and pointing out how wine should be properly chilled.
Their observations can be entertaining, but they become tiresome as well, interjecting the almost libertarian tone you could find in old Christopher Hitchens columns. (At their worst, these sections read like second-rate Ignatius J Reilly, another famous New Orleans denizen, although McCarthy’s writing rarely falls to that level.)
The book veers away from plot as it moves to its conclusion, occupying us instead with moments of solitude and asceticism that are also present in McCarthy’s previous work–I remembered the sojourn in the Smokies in “Suttree.” There are also a few sections that seem constructed to let him get some ideas off his chest…what’s up with the Kennedy assassination digression, for instance?
Like any McCarthy book, though, “The Passenger” alternates gritty plotting and shop-savvy men with long passages that build toward transcendence. He’s always searching, it seems, for how the world can be both cruel and beautiful. This book adds to that legacy, summing it up in many ways, even if it falls short of the height of his masterworks.
Quotes
“I always had a feelin the money didn’t mean all that much to you. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“I don’t know. A lot of money would probably move me. I could do some things I wanted. But you’ll never get rich selling your time. Not even doing hyperbaric welding.”
“Probably right. There’s more brain surgeons than there are hyperbaric welders, but you’re probably right.”
“I know that you think we’re very different, me and thee. My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people. But our common history transcends so much. I know you. I know certain days of your childhood. All but weeping with loneliness. Coming upon a certain book in the library and clutching it to you. Carrying it home. Some perfect place to read it. Under a tree perhaps. Beside a stream. Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, don’t we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? The legacy of the world is a fragile thing for all its power, but I know where you stand, Squire. I know that there are words spoken by men ages dead that will never leave your heart.”
“But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry.”
“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
“Friends are always telling you to watch out. To take care. But it could be that the more you do so the more exposed you become. Maybe you just have to turn yourself over to your angel.”
“You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.”
“What is the purpose of human charity wasn’t to protect the weak—which seems pretty anti-Darwinian anyway—but to preserve the mad? Don’t they get special treatment in most primitive societies?…You have to be careful about who you do away with. It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves.”