The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An Allegory of the Bomb

For one of McCarthy’s more fascinating characters, “To the seasoned traveler a destination is at best a rumor.” I suspect this is the author himself providing a clue about The Passenger. There is only the vaguest hint of a destination and even less than that about the port of departure. A nest of puzzles with missing pieces. I am led to believe that the seasoned reader doesn’t mind and is satisfied with the sights along the journey, among which:

- Two protagonists (one dead the other obsessively grieving, neither of whom would claim mental stability).
- Four secrets/mysteries (personal, professional, and those involving national security, none resolved).
- A large cast of supporting characters (most of whom appear suddenly and aren’t heard from again).
- A substantial trove of arcania (about deep sea diving, guns, oil rigs, Big Easy cusine, and how to eat raw venison, among others).
- Tributes to various literary styles (from Joyce to Hemingway and beyond).
- Continual allusion to the epistemological problem of human existence (with several contrary conclusions).
- Guilt in various forms (about the atom bomb as well as inadequate relationship skills).
- Several rather interesting travel guides (particularly the American West and the Spanish islands).

Fortunately McCarthy supplies plethora of bon mots which dulls the craving for any destination at all. For example:

- “You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world.”
- “Without malefactors the world of the righteous is robbed of all meaning.”
- “… having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
- “Even if all news of the world was a lie it would not then follow that there is some counterfactual truth for it to be a lie about.”
- “It could be that some part of our understanding comes in vessels incapable of sustaining themselves. ”

This last certainly applies to me.

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