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"Yes.
"What happened to the cabin?
"It burned down.
"Was there anyone living in it?
"No.
"How did it happen to burn down?
"I don't know. Maybe it was struck by lightning.
"Struck by lightning.
"One might suppose.
"You left school after that.
"Yes.
"Why?"
Cormac McCarthy's books have been discussed here several times already. My sometimes almost coherent, sometimes barely incoherent thoughts on All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, Outer Dark, Suttree and The Crossing are linked here for the sake of a dubious posterity.
The Passenger is McCarthy's second-to-last novel. His last novel, Stella Maris, is a companion novel to The Passenger. In this review of The Passenger I may be missing aspects of a much larger story, but I have no idea when I'll be reading that more recent book, or even if I'll happen upon it anytime soon. Whatever the case, I find that I have to take breaks between McCarthy novels, and I'm not in a rush to read Stella Maris, however entertaining (or turgid) it might be.
On to the novel at hand. The Passenger is about a man by the name of Western mourning his sister's recent death. This story opens on a salvage operation involving a missing plane, and to some extent the novel leads you to believe that this salvage operation will somehow tie into the book's conclusion, but no, it adds little to the final chapters aside from both a sense of paranoia and the protagonist's reason for being in a certain place at a certain time. Ultimately he doesn't know what forces are acting against him or why, and in this respect he's no different from you or I, however world-wise we may think we are.
Apart from the salvage operation there are digressions into quantum physics, automotive maintenance and several other, seemingly unrelated topics. The section on quantum physics seems especially detached from the plot, and one gets the feeling that the author was using this section to parade his knowledge of obscure subjects at the expense of the story he was trying to tell. I'm not sure, again because I haven't read Stella Maris.
The Passenger is also a long book, and at several junctures I found my patience tested. Given the way in which conversations are described (or not described) in this book, I had trouble keeping track of who was talking and why. This approach to such exchanges also makes interactions between three or more characters almost impossible, given that it would be very, very hard to know what was being said and to whom. This (dare I say it) shortcoming also makes these conversations seem somewhat artificial, and especially so given how well similar conversations worked in previous novels by the same author.
Was The Passenger entertaining? I'd have to say that no, it wasn't, and that compared to many of McCarthy's other novels this one gave me the most trouble. It seemed very random to me at times, and far from the concentrated effort that I enjoyed in Blood Meridian or the author's Border Trilogy.
It's possible that after reading Stella Maris I'd find that the parts which don't seem to fit in The Passenger suddenly make sense within a larger narrative. Maybe. Whatever the case, I'm in no hurry to read that other book.
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