Kaleidoscopic.
This is the best word to describe The Passenger. It’s one that people often apply to works of literature without seriously thinking about its implications.
But this novel embodies that word, and the word embodies the novel, fully. As in a kaleidoscope, the shifting images occasionally fail to coalesce - but when they do, the effect is totally singular.
I didn’t say “good,” but I don’t think value adjectives like good and bad really apply to The Passenger. It’s basically impossible to categorize. If I could liken it to existing media, it would be a combination of a philosophical treatise and a 4chan schizopost.
Topics covered include physics, sea life, underwater welding, the Vietnam War, the atomic bomb, extraterrestrial visits, and the JFK assassination. Most of them are tackled in dialogue between Bobby Western and an assortment of characters who never get much in the way of development. It’s somewhat similar to Suttree - in fact, this novel is somewhat similar to a lot of McCarthy’s other work. Shades of Outer Dark, Cities of the Plain, The Road, and No Country are also present.
Oh, the plot? It really doesn’t matter. The plane crash is forgotten almost as soon as it’s mentioned. It serves more as a central metaphor. There’s a mystery at the core of things, a mystery we’ll never know the answer to. Hell, we’ll never even know the question, really.
The central metaphor is a little at odds with the central focus of Bobby’s character: his grief. Or is it? We don’t know why things happen; they just come and go. A novel of intellectual abdication, throwing its hands up, however, would not be very interesting to read, so McCarthy also chooses to include an autopsy of the last millennium in its final days, and a prophecy for what is to come. At one point, the omniscient narrator reveals himself to mention, in a throwaway line, that the Holocaust and the bombing of Japan were the two events that “sealed the fate of the West,” one proof of man’s cruelty and the other of man’s inability to forgive cruelty. And as those two events sealed the fate of the West, they seem to have sealed the fate of Western.
You may get the idea that The Passenger is something like three novels in one. That’s a pretty accurate impression. All of these disparate novels are superimposed over one another in a manner reminiscent of James Joyce. While McCarthy’s written depiction of the spoken word is as wonderful as ever, the unspoken - where he does some of his best work - is unfortunately almost nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, the oil rig and Idaho sections are nicely evocative, and the last chapter is a welcome return to his greatest strength.
So, what do I ultimately make of this book? I’m not sure. Bobby is the passenger. Alicia is the passenger. I’m the passenger. You’re the passenger. Fuck it. None of us know where we’re going, or even where we started. We’re suspended in existence like flies in embryonic fluid, deprived of the ability to make heads or tails of our lives.
McCarthy was the passenger too. It was nice to ride alongside him for a while.