Ultimately to be viewed as a lesser work by one of America’s greatest authors The Passenger still stands light years ahead of most works of fiction.
The Passenger carries all of the usual quirks of a McCarthy novel—the lack of punctuation, lack of separation between speakers, a use of vocabulary that is stunning in its depth and breadth, deeply philosophical discussions regarding our place in the universe, and so on. Its all here for McCarthy fans who are unlikely to be disappointed in anything he produces.
Count me among McCarthy fans and The Passenger will be a work that stays with me for a long time as well as will be referring back to and rereading. It is not a complete work though. Having worked on The Passenger on and off since the 1970s I would have expected a more fully formed set of characters and coherent narrative. Instead the work is largely a channel through which McCarthy is able to discuss topics he is interested in since his residence at the Santa Fe Institute and his long term interest in the hard sciences of physics and advanced mathematics.
The primary character in Bobby Western may be a salvage diver, a former race car driver, and son of Manhattan Project scientist but he’s really a shell of McCarthy’s personal interests in the hard sciences while all activity that swirls around Western in the course of the novel does not serve in moving a narrative forward, it merely services as random encounters that allow for exposition on the physics topics McCarthy wants to discuss and what these topics mean for how we view our (and really how McCarthy views) existence.
All of which can be very interesting (and it is), can scramble your brain in terms of implications (it does), and create beautiful turns of phrase on par with any crafter of the written word ever. What it doesn’t do is create a true story like McCarthy’s other works. There is no question as to the “story” that lies at the heart of works like Blood Meridian or any of the Border Trilogy works. There are core characters that have a life you can touch and feel…you know their place in the world and how they interact with it. Here, Bobby Western is a passive creation upon which events occur rather than one who drives the action or events. Its a very different creation than the father in The Road, John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses, or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. And overall it is less satisfying—just not less interesting, mind altering, or likely to drive a review of how you see the world. McCarthy’s best works do this within a narrative and characters that the reader finds value in and long term attachment to and this one doesn’t get there alongside his Tier 1 works.