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.
Bobby Western endures such a low-intensity, relaxed persecution that The Passenger only fitfully functions as the thriller it gestures at being – the vibe is more Kafka on the bayou. Having absorbed modernism and the dislocations of the technological society, literary novelists of McCarthy’s generation decided that while it was fair game to present a mystery, it was gauche to resolve one, and so the enigma of the downed plane and its absent passenger sinks into the background, beacon of a broader metaphysical disquietude. Meanwhile, Bobby hangs out at bars conversing about desultory subjects – the Vietnam war, string theory, even the Kennedy assassination – with a shifty cast of demi-monders (most memorably, a trans beauty named Debussy Fields and a sententious sleazeball with a biblical turn of phrase named Long John Sheddan).
This ambling, messy novel is in many ways unmistakably a Cormac McCarthy joint. We get the polysyndetic sentences of numbly procedural description (“Western watched the tender and he blew on the tea and sipped it and he watched the lights moving along the causeway like the slow cellular crawl of waterdrops on a wire”), the severely pessimistic vision of human nature, the near-total absence of interiority, and of course the Melvilleian blasts of end times lyricism – there’s a lot of that. McCarthy has always walked a fine line between the profound and the preposterous (recall The Counsellor, Ridley Scott’s bonkers 2013 film based on his screenplay, at once ridiculous and nightmarish), and The Passenger shows cavalier disdain for the risks of self-parody run by a singular stylist writing deep into his 80s. While some writers betray an ambition to be priest or president, McCarthy remains shamelessly bent on prophet status, preferably in the Old Testament lineage. His characters megaphone the planet-smashing McCarthy high style, which can read like the philosopher EM Cioran minus the villainous hilarity: “When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced.” The veteran apocalypticist even samples himself: Debussy’s “There is no God and I am she” echoes the awesome/farcical pronouncement in The Road: “There is no God and we are his prophets.”
What marks both of these novels off from McCarthy’s prior work, though, is a new and committed engagement with physics and mathematics. Halfway through The Passenger, Bobby launches without foreplay into a barroom discourse that walks us through several decades’ developments in quantum mechanics and even more esoteric disciplines. Ludicrously dense and of precisely zero benefit to the story, it feels like an affront: not knowing what to do with all his brain-breaking research, the author simply dumps it on his readers. The formal problem is one of incommensurability: spooky physics and quantum indeterminacy confound classical fiction by destabilising the reality to which realism defers. In short, you can’t dramatise this stuff – laudable ambition smashes into the wall of its impossible fulfilment.
The apparently slighter sister-novel (in more sense than one) Stella Maris proves a better vessel for McCarthy’s lofty scientific concerns. Consisting purely of dialogue, it records Alicia Western’s DeLillo-esque conversations with a middle-aged, male psychiatrist at the titular mental institution in 1972, where she is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Through these heady exchanges McCarthy thoroughly outs himself as the dark gnostic he always was – void-mystic and cartographer of a satanic dominion. The volcanic bloodlust of his great novels has subsided; there remains a substrate of cosmic fear and ontological malevolence. While Stella Maris proffers a rudimentary fictive puppetry, at base it’s an impressionistic treatise on the nature of reality, tracing the outlines of a dread architecture beyond the visible and the intuitive. The soaringly pretentious dialogue between a troubled autodidact (conveniently, Alicia has spent a decade reading several books a day and can remember all of it) and her awed shrink generates nihilist koans that double as jokes:
“Do you believe in an afterlife?
I don’t believe in this one.”
“Do you think of yourself as an atheist?
God no. Those were the good old days.”
Whether or not the ominous physics and math-mysticism add up to a novel in the sense commonly understood – or enjoyed – is debatable. But it is something, not least the vehicle for a specifically novelistic kind of philosophising less concerned with establishing systems than with the dark fire of wild insight and forbidden revelation (the advent of the atom bomb is felt not just as a world-historical but a theological event). Alicia is part flesh-and-blood character, part archetypal crack in the screen of rationalism through which blows an ill wind from the abyssal outside. A torturously grim account of how it feels to drown in an ice-cold lake pulls these sinister abstractions into the all-too-concrete. It seems that in the decades of research he reputedly devoted to these disquieting subjects, Cormac McCarthy learned only what he already knew: “That there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been. That at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium.”
Rob Doyle’s most recent books are Autobibliography and Threshold
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy is published by Picador (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
