The Passenger (The Passenger Series)
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • The story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times
Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now.
1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.
Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.
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Community Reviews
Going into this, I had read every McCarthy novel except for Passenger and Stella Maris. I have liked all of them and loved several (The Road, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Crossing).
For me, The Passenger was a little bit more like The Orchard Keeper and Suttree, which both started slow and didn't seem to be very well focused. However, where those two eventually came together and won me over (for the most part), I didn't really feel a similar swell of appreciation for The Passenger. It has several moments of gorgeous prose. It's conversations are almost always engaging. The emotional journey of the lead character is pretty touching, although if that was meant to be the core of the novel then I don't think we got enough of it.
The surreal Alicia interstitial chapters were ... interesting. Sometimes funny. But largely felt pointless by the end. Incidentally, there's a very plausible suggestion that the Thalidimide Kid is the stillborn child of Alicia and Bobby. There were a few moments where these chapters seemed possibly to say something significant, but mostly they just felt like random fever dreams - something out of Pynchon.
There are lengthy conversations about physics that I think were a major mistake - McCarthy doesn't seem to know enough to say something worth while. It comes off as posing.
McCarthy seems to know more and have more to say with the JFK conspiracy stuff, but frankly one of his contemporaries already wrote a whole novel about this - Libra by Delillo - that is far superior.
And really neither of those two convos have much to do with the real heart of the novel - thematically or plot-wise.
The only thing that really saved the novel was the fact that McCarthy can write like no one else. Even when I was reading material I felt pointless, I would think to myself - "well, at least he still gives it some life"
And the best parts of the novel are those that look at the interior life of Bobby, the protagonist. And there's a decent amount. I just wish the whole novel was like that.
It is inevitable, though, that when you endeavor to read all of the works of an author, they won't all prove out. And I almost always end up saving the least for last. I'm currently in the middle of doing the same thing with Faulkner, Woolf, and Hemingway, in fact!
However, I can say, thankfully, that after reading the first three chapters of stella Maris, that novel is much more interesting and is made more so by having read the Passenger. So even if you feel like the Passenger is mediocre, you will end up with a happier end via its sister novel.
For me, The Passenger was a little bit more like The Orchard Keeper and Suttree, which both started slow and didn't seem to be very well focused. However, where those two eventually came together and won me over (for the most part), I didn't really feel a similar swell of appreciation for The Passenger. It has several moments of gorgeous prose. It's conversations are almost always engaging. The emotional journey of the lead character is pretty touching, although if that was meant to be the core of the novel then I don't think we got enough of it.
The surreal Alicia interstitial chapters were ... interesting. Sometimes funny. But largely felt pointless by the end. Incidentally, there's a very plausible suggestion that the Thalidimide Kid is the stillborn child of Alicia and Bobby. There were a few moments where these chapters seemed possibly to say something significant, but mostly they just felt like random fever dreams - something out of Pynchon.
There are lengthy conversations about physics that I think were a major mistake - McCarthy doesn't seem to know enough to say something worth while. It comes off as posing.
McCarthy seems to know more and have more to say with the JFK conspiracy stuff, but frankly one of his contemporaries already wrote a whole novel about this - Libra by Delillo - that is far superior.
And really neither of those two convos have much to do with the real heart of the novel - thematically or plot-wise.
The only thing that really saved the novel was the fact that McCarthy can write like no one else. Even when I was reading material I felt pointless, I would think to myself - "well, at least he still gives it some life"
And the best parts of the novel are those that look at the interior life of Bobby, the protagonist. And there's a decent amount. I just wish the whole novel was like that.
It is inevitable, though, that when you endeavor to read all of the works of an author, they won't all prove out. And I almost always end up saving the least for last. I'm currently in the middle of doing the same thing with Faulkner, Woolf, and Hemingway, in fact!
However, I can say, thankfully, that after reading the first three chapters of stella Maris, that novel is much more interesting and is made more so by having read the Passenger. So even if you feel like the Passenger is mediocre, you will end up with a happier end via its sister novel.
Thought provoking analysis of what it means to be human, and what it means to act ethically. Lots of disparate strands play along the path of this narrative. We follow Bobby Western and as an echo, his little sister Alice through shared components of their lives. I was seldom sure which characters were people and which were hallucinations in this, but it always made me consider.
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