A body is found in the snow on Christmas day. Golden haired, yellow booted, red sashed against the whiteness of the snow, some bit of colour in the scrupulous desolation.
So begins THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy, a mystery mosaic, a garrulous adventure, as unique and opaque as anything written by this eminent imaginarian.
It’s a striking image but amounts to a hill of herrings hued in rouge when it comes to main narrative concerning a deep sea diving salvage agent called Bob Western.
He’s been employed to locate the submerged fuselage of a sunken plane, only to discover one of the passengers listed in the manifest is missing.
Suspect by association, Western is interrogated, his place ransacked and the pool of paranoia deepens.
Making the fabulous real, the ordinary mysterious, infused with a stark mythic quality and a freakish imaginative flair, THE PASSENGER is particularly powerful in its dazzling dialogue. The vernacular is spectacular, the demotic embroidered and elevated to divine eloquence. It is the novel’s hero, with its blazing phrasing, its clarion call to be read out loud, a pleasure to the eye, tongue and ear.
The prose is more ornate and obscure, passages on science dense and eye glazing, maths and myths collide in metaphor and malapropism. And there’s the strange case of Western’s deceased sibling, Alicia, with its incestuous implications.
Allusions to The Manhattan Project, a creature called the Thalidomide Kid, a ventriloquist dummy called Crandall, considerations on the Kennedy assassination all add to an unabating pleasure to read, albeit sometimes infuriating and opaque with an almost overpowering use of language.
THE PASSENGER and its coda, STELLA MARIS, are deliberately frustrating novels, both resisting any straightforward reconstruction of the truth.
Individually and together, they form a disconcerting concatenation, daring and provocative, that demands boundless admiration for its audacity.
Take a deep breath and read these books with your ears.
THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy and STELLA MARIS by Cormac McCarthy are published by Picador.