Published a decade and a half ago, The Road might have aptly concluded Cormac McCarthy’s extraordinary career in fiction. What better way of bowing out than with a novel that imagined, in horrifying verisimilitude, the end of all things? But no! Nearing his 90th birthday, McCarthy has returned with two linked novels: one relatively substantial and typical, and the other – presented as a coda and published a month later – spare, sinister and radical.
First, the former. Set in the early 1980s, The Passenger charts the destiny of siblings Bobby and Alicia Western (it’s as if John le Carré had named a protagonist Jonny Spythriller). Bobby is a classic McCarthyist type, brooding and reserved, haunted by grief since his sister killed herself a decade earlier, and by guilt for the sins of his father, a physicist who helped Oppenheimer birth the atom bomb. A Formula 2 racer turned salvage diver who happens to boast advanced knowledge of theoretical physics, Bobby takes part in a dive at an offshore plane crash that fails to turn up in any news reports, and from among whose dead one passenger is mysteriously missing. Thereafter he is harassed by shadowy figures of uncertain affiliation, his New Orleans home repeatedly broken into and his assets seized. Nurturing a death wish, he rereads 37 letters left behind by Alicia – doomed, young, beautiful and supernaturally intelligent. Italicised scenes from Alicia’s short life depict her in tiresome conversation with the “cohorts”, an assembly of hallucinated personalities fronted by the Thalidomide Kid, who has flippers for hands.
