The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

 

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy needs a quiet reading space and a lot of time. It is intense, complicated and at times just plain hard to decipher. Bobby Western is a salvage diver although in a previous life he raced cars in Europe. Bobby and his friend, Oiler, are sent down to survey a sunken passenger plane but both decide they have no desire to be part of its retrieval. Back on land Bobby questions what he has seen and this, he presumes, is why he begins to be hounded by a pair of shadowy men, after which he is on the run and hiding from them all through the story.

It is also the story of Bobby’s sister, Alicia, and it is no spoiler to say that at the beginning of the book Alicia is found to have hanged herself. Alicia is a schizophrenic mathematical genius and she and Bobby share a deep although unconsummated (I think) love for each other. Alicia’s schizophrenic visions take up a large part of the story but I found them very entertaining; however, the pages on complicated mathematical questions and things like string theory were too obscure for my non-mathematical brain and as far as I could see I didn’t miss any of the story by skimming over and then finally skipping them.

Bobby and his friends and their conversations vaguely brought to mind some of my all-time literary favourites, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row characters. Strangely, Cormac McCarthy keeps structuring his paragraphs into long sentences strung together with the conjunction ‘and’ over and over. I guess his stature as a Great American Writer gives him licence to play around with grammar any way he likes but it takes a bit of getting used to. I had to resort to Google many times for the meanings of some strange words: a piece of driftwood is shaped like a ‘homunculus’ which is an image of a small human being made of clay, or the map of the brain; ‘adamantine’ in relation to a snake means aggressive. There are lots of others and if you’ve got a dictionary handy it can be quite fun to look them up as they appear.

I would sum this book up as: 1. masterly prose;  2. extremely unusual.

I am undaunted (bloody but unbowed?) by my interpretation above and am looking forward to reading Alicia’s story, Stella Maris, which is, I believe, in the form of question and answer sessions with her psychiatrist.

Published by  Picador

Pan Macmillan