The Passenger

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / McCarthy, Cormac, Adult Book / Fiction / Historical / McCarthy, Cormac
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Malletts Creek Branch, Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch, Westgate Branch

In 1980 Pass Christian, Mississippi, salvage diver Bobby Western, after a plane crash, discovers that the pilot's flight bag, the plane's black box and the tenth passenger are missing, submerging him in a conspiracy beyond his understanding as he is shadowed in body and spirit by the past and present.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A Strange Performance submitted by cdunlop on June 19, 2023, 3:53pm This novel is a tough nut to crack. Early on, Bobby Western, a salvage diver, explores the underwater wreckage of a recently-crashed JetStar plane. He notices that the pilot's flight bag is missing, as is a panel of electronic equipment in the cockpit. And he subsequently learns that one of the plane's passengers is missing.

Given that opening, plus the book's title, one might expect that the mystery would be unravelled. But instead it is simply forgotten, as is another theme (Bobby's being tracked by the Feds). There is no real plot here; instead, we get a muted character study of Bobby, and a bunch of high-flown ideas taken from arcane mathematics and quantum physics. Bobby is a physics graduate school dropout, and his sister, Alicia, was a brilliant young mathematician who committed suicide. They were in love with each other, although the exact nature of their relationship is left somewhat vague.

The chapters alternate between mostly conversational scenes to which Bobby contributes little of substance, and hallucinations that his sister suffers -- visions featuring a psychosis-induced collection of circus-like troupe characters, led by the "Thalidomide Kid". Later in the story, Bobby has an apparent conversation with Alicia's hallucinatory figure, but it doesn't illuminate anything. (McCarthy's companion sequel, Stella Maris, features Alicia and her psychiatrist; their conversations constitute the whole of that volume, and do shed some further light on Bobby, who eventually ended up living in a windmill in Spain.)

At age 89, McCarthy (recently deceased) was still a brilliant writer, and the book is worth reading simply because of that. It is full of digressions, e.g., JFK's assassination conspiracies, Vietnam, and the atomic bomb (Bobby's farther worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project), so it serves as a cultural reminder of some painful American historical episodes. The Passenger is full of wordplay and puns, e.g., "Gladly the cross-eyed Bear" as a stand-in for the hymn "Gladly the cross I'd Bear" (p. 352), but absent any context, it's easy to overlook some of these items.

The reader is left with numerous unanswered questions. Perhaps it's a strength of the book that it leaves some room for pondering. But if you're looking for action or plot, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Not McCarthy's best, but still worth a read... submitted by foilista on June 21, 2023, 12:51pm About halfway through this book, I couldn't decide if it was good or not; it really grew on me as I continued reading. The best part of the novel, for me, was McCarthy's turns of phrase. I love his observations of the natural world and descriptions of solitude, despair, survival, etc. I also enjoyed the Kafkaesque paranoid plot about Bobby's salvage diving and the sunken plane.

I found the genius characters at the heart of The Passenger to be a little overdone. Alicia is one of the best mathematical minds in the world AND the most beautiful woman most people have ever seen AND a violin virtuoso? Bobby is a salvage diver AND a racecar driver? However, I enjoyed the side characters and was especially drawn to Debussy.

All in all, a good read. I look forward to Stella Maris.