The Passenger: Does Cormac McCarthy know what he’s doing?

The Passenger begins with a hanging. No surprises there – Cormac McCarthy is nothing if not an eloquent butcher. Ultimately, the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s latest effort is infuriating.

The Passenger begins with a hanging. No surprises there – Cormac McCarthy is nothing if not an eloquent butcher.

The Passenger begins with a hanging. No surprises there – Cormac McCarthy is nothing if not an eloquent butcher. But it’s the aftermath we see here – not the violence of the act, but the cruel stillness of a body dangling above the snow, a young woman having extinguished a whole world. And there, on page one, is a clue to the mystery of McCarthy’s bewildering masterpiece, his literary diptych, two books released not quite simultaneously but almost, with the message that time, space, the very universe itself, cannot exist without witness.

Problem is, there are too many witnesses – as many as the living things of planet Earth – so we can’t know for sure which narrator, which universe, to trust.

The Passenger and Stella Maris are meant to be read in sequence, which is why their release dates are a month apart. One is forced to dwell on the enigma of the first before salvation arrives encoded in the second. It’s a bold plan that only a writer of McCarthy’s stature could possibly have sold to an anxious publisher. And it’s one hell of an ask for any reader, especially apostles of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s earlier work. Those anticipating another violent struggle against the beasts and bedlam of the American southwest will find their expectations thwarted by the unlikeliest of fiends: arithmetic.

It‘s been 16 years since The Road, McCarthy’s last novel, and since then the 89-year-old has been lurking in the halls of the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank in New Mexico of which he is the lone writer-in-residence, his neighbours all physicists, quantum theorists and assorted wranglers of philosophical monsters. These books are the children of an obsession that has led him to a new frontier, a borderland of the mind where mathematics and madness meet on the blurriest of lines in the sand.

Cormac McCarthy.

The story goes like this: Robert Western, a salvage diver, is puzzled by a crashed and sunken aircraft he and his team have been charged with inspecting. Though they need to use an acetylene torch to cut their way through the doors of the fuselage, they realise a passenger is missing among the dead, along with the plane’s data recorder and other items that couldn’t possibly have been removed while the aircraft was underwater.

Upon returning from the job, the team is pursued by mysterious men in suits, who seem unduly anxious about what Western and his buddies may have seen. The heat becomes so intense that Western moves house, repeatedly, with the suits always catching up, his digs becoming more claustrophobic as he goes, his escape devolving into a journey of sorts in which he encounters old friends and new, with each episode tinged with a feeling of finality, or atonement. Western, it seems, is getting his house in order.

Meanwhile, every other chapter takes us back to the nightmarish world of Alicia, the girl whose corpse we met on page one. She is planning her own suicide and very quickly we learn why. Twenty years old, quick witted and, by all accounts, stupefyingly gorgeous, Alicia has already been recognised as a rare genius of mathematics and its applied sciences. Quite a catch. But interested gentlemen should be warned – they have some competition.

Firstly, Alicia is hopelessly in love with her big brother, salvage diver Robert Western. As if that isn’t off-putting enough, Alicia’s bedroom is never empty of weird “personages”, most notably an annoying dwarf with flippers for arms (Alicia calls him “The Thalidomide Kid”), who badgers and jousts with her relentlessly in a voice one imagines to be that of Steve Buscemi (“Christ! Jesus! That’s it! I’m a sonofabitch!”). Chronic schizophrenia is often the bastard sibling of genius.

The Passenger tells both these tales, while Stella Maris consists entirely of notes made by Alicia’s psychiatrist, transcripts of conversations occurring in the facility from which the book takes its title. On its own, The Passenger is an infuriating book, a collage of unfinished action, unconvincing dialogue and characters that seem only partly drawn, appearing with little context or explanation, their biographies often vainly delivered by themselves in monologues coaxed out of them by Western, supposedly an old friend of most of them. It’s as if he’s a journalist getting the story straight one last time, or a turncoat wearing a wire, known truths repeated for the benefit of another.

Elsewhere, Western, himself a student of physics, engages in long conversations about matters seemingly unrelated to the plight at hand; the Manhattan Project, the assassination of JFK, potted histories of scientists known and obscure – interesting stuff to ponder, but so dense with theories and extrapolations of fact that McCarthy barely gives himself space to write. We get little of the author’s eye camera that has so distinguished his previous works.

Above the many questions posed by this shambles is a simple one that must be answered first: has McCarthy lost it – his talent, his mind – or does he know exactly what he’s doing? The answer is handed to us in Stella Maris, whose subject matter is no less dense, but whose dialogue is slick, sharp and clever as McCarthy has ever been; and sad because we know Alicia’s brilliant universe is already gone, that what we’re seeing is the light from a distant star that has long been dark.

McCarthy, it seems, has been struck by a revelation almost religious in nature, its mysteries so powerful as to move him to sacrifice his very reputation as a novelist just to have us see what he has seen. There is a reason The Passenger is so translucent, and it has more to do with genius than failure.

Which is not to say Stella Maris provides all the answers. It doesn’t. One is left to consider several theories as to what is going on here, and, like the theories of quantum physics, none of them will be necessarily watertight. Famously mute on the topic of his novels, McCarthy will never tell, his silence potentially transforming the bourgeois world of book clubs into violent showdowns worthy of the author’s early work.

“Life,” says the Thalidomide Kid. “What can you say? It’s not for everyone.” Neither is this literary double album. Some will check out before page 50, and not even McCarthy himself would blame them. Those who persist may never see the world through the same eyes again.

Jack Marx is a writer and critic who lives in Broken Hill.

The Passenger/ Stella Maris

Two books, both by Cormac McCarthy

Pan Macmillan, $49.99 and $39.99 (HB)