Book Review: The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

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.

Book Review: The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

The second in McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy” series, “The Crossing” finds itself in an odd position of being a “sequel” that is better than its progenitor but also far less well known.

Much of that has to do with the poorly received “All the Pretty Horses” film. Still, “The Crossing” is the better of the two works. More complex than ATPH it shifts between three distinct stories, each connected to the protagonist’s three trips across the border into Mexico. The most remarked upon is the first of these three in an attempt by the young man to return a wolf to its supposed native mountains across the border. The book ends with that same character’s efforts to discover and return his siblings bones to the United States.

What occurs in between are numerous highs, lows, quasi-mystical conversations, horrific violence (of course), descriptions of nature worthy of a naturalist poet, and an adherence to an outmoded sense of honor. Like ATPH this work is headed by a young male who encounters events and people constantly at odds with his view of life. At every turn life is set against him only to fail in grinding him beneath its boot. Yes, Billy Parnham, like John Grady Cole in ATPH is a husk of himself by the end but…its a husk that is still upright and holds to his ideals.

Be forewarned...the book is hard, as all McCarthy’s are for one reason or another…Here it is McCarthy’s lack of English translations for speech between characters conversing in Spanish. No help is given to the reader in translating these sections were are very significant. Some contextual cues surround these passages but it is largely left up to the reader to either understand it or not. It gives the book a feeling like much of McCarthy’s works—that you are missing something. That there is something just under the surface that you are missing that might help you understand what stands behind the passages but just out of your grasp. That’s not a bad thing.

Book Review: All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

I always seem to have an issue starting Cormac McCarthy works. The lack of punctuation, capitalization, and other structure devices throws me for a loop to start and makes me wonder if I really want to continue with the novel. It truly does get you to reframe how you read and how you interpret what are the thoughts or descriptions of the author vs. statements and viewpoints of the character.

I always continue however simply because the content is just so damn good. Yes its violent and highly masculine in nature. Yes it borrows from Hemingway and other “male” authors. Yes, it is highly likely to be “cancelled” along with his other works in the near future as being a last vestige of an older world version of what is quality writing. There is no magic-realism, there are traditional male/female roles presented, violence is a way of getting things done, now discarded ideas of independence, stoicism, honor, objective truth, and so on are seen as valuable. In short? Your modern high school teacher having been “educated” at Smith or Marist or other Liberal Arts junk factories will not only hate it but seek to eliminate it from acknowledgement.

Now, as for All the Pretty Horses itself, its by far the most “enjoyable” of McCarthy’s works I’ve read so far (others being Blood Meridian and Outer Dark) but still tells the tale of a doomed protagonist. From the beginning, no matter how pleasant the scenario (and maybe this is just from knowing McCarthy’s tendencies) the reader can feel the guillotine hanging over the characters, readying its fall at any moment. None escape the impact of seemingly inconsequential actions and associations.

I won’t get into the exact details, many of which you may know if you have watched the generally detested film version of this novel that came out in 2000 and which I’ll now have to go back and rewatch simply to make my own comparison after having read the book as I originally viewed it some decade or more ago and do not remember any feelings on it one way or another.

The core of the novel takes place in the ranchland and deserts of Northern Mexico though does venture into the towns and a prison of that same area in the just post WWII period. We often think of films and works like The Wild Bunch and others as showing the true end of the American West as being something taking place in the late 1800s or at the latest, very early 1900s, but McCarthy has drawn the closing of the American West forward some 50-80 years to the mid 20th century. In truth, McCarthy is pointing out that these issues, these cultures, these landscapes and the “hardness” that they demand, never go away. The independence and self reliance that is seen as an outdated characteristic associated with the white, American, cowboy, never really go away just because times change—thus the reason why McCarthy has moved his same motifs into very current periods with No Country for Old Men and his flashier pop-spinoffs like Taylor Sheridan have put forth works like Sicario and Yellowstone.

Backing all of McCarthy’s prose is his clearly deep love of the terrain and environment itself. His descriptions of the brush, dirt, dust, animals, vegetation, landscapes are near without equal (Edward Abbey perhaps?) in my various readings. This is not a novel written by someone who has a cursory knowledge of the hardscrabble lives of those living on the Western edges of our country (whether that is US or Mexico) but someone who has lived it first hand. The phrase “write what you know” comes to mind and McCarthy knows the depths of both man and nature better than almost anyone else I have read.