Cormac McCarthy’s previous novel, The Road, was published sixteen years ago. Both the book and the film adaptation were a huge success. Since then it has been quiet. I listened for a long time and happily to the rumors that there could be more novels on the way. Not least the suggestion that McCarthy had plans to write about a woman this time, which would mean a new turn for the author who has now turned 89 years old. Eventually it became true to say more of a hope than a belief that a novel would come. One more. So here it is. Not just one, but the first of two. The second will be called “Stella Maris” and will arrive in November. There is much evidence of a close relationship between the two. In what way remains to be seen. So has he written about a woman? Nah. We’ll see, I think we say. The last word has probably been written, but not yet read. Cormac McCarthy Photo: Evan Agostini / AP American author born in 1933. Gained a large audience with the novels “All the Pretty Horses” from 1992 and “The Crossing” from 1995. Several of McCarthy’s books have been made into films, e.g. “No Country for Old Men” (2005) and “The Road” (2006), for which he also won the Pulitzer Prize. According to the American literary critic Harold Bloom, McCarthy, together with Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, constitute the four greats in contemporary American prose. Infinitely more than a thriller “The Passenger” is strong fare anyway. McCarthy’s prose shines in multiple shades, whether it’s in carnal dialogues, deep passages about grief and forgiveness or the history of physics. Recognizably McCarthy, but also new. On Christmas Day, a woman lies dead in a forest in Wisconsin. A hunter finds her, she has tied a red belt around herself so that she will be found, despite the snow and the weather. The reader knows that this is not the start of a murder story. It’s something else. It is the early eighties, Bobby Western works as a diver for a rescue company. The mission: to investigate a small passenger plane that has sunk in the sea off New Orleans. It hasn’t been there for long, but no one talks about it. They dive and find passengers still strapped into their seats. But one of them is missing, inexplicably absent from the closed hull. Just like the black box. Not long after, Western is approached by people with certificates of service. They have questions – where is the last passenger and the trip recorder. They come again, his room is searched. It is going to be hard. So maybe it’s a thriller McCarthy has served us. It may look that way for a while, but again, it’s something else. And infinitely more. The young woman Alicia and her conversations with the so-called Thalidomide bag and his strange entourage add new elements to the language and experience of this book. They come to her at night and perform strange variety acts and tricks. Tassen talks to her as if he knows everything, claims and assumes, pushes. Alicia, who is Bobby’s sister, is not only young – she is also a brilliant mathematical talent, but is far from well off in life. She also represents the sadness in Bobby Western’s life. Part of the grief. Developed the atomic bomb A gloomy and sorrowful novel, I wrote at the start. It is true, but not comprehensive. The “Passenger” penetrates into our post-war era from a number of entrances and angles and gives the text a great boost. Bobby and Alicia Western’s father was a colleague of Oppenheimer and part of the team that developed the atomic bomb in the latter part of World War II. The same bomb penetrates the text and onto the reader, also with its presence in Bobby’s troubled life. Bobby himself was a scientific talent, a man of physics, but walked away from it. Can the father be forgiven for his work, his role? This problematic, individual and general, vibrates in long sections of the text so that the reader knows it. In a conversation late in the novel: And towards the end: Take it, you, I thought when I read those sentences just before the book ran out of words. It’s not funny. On the way there are bizarre accounts of strange, but also true camaraderie, noble people, deep paranoia. Schizophrenia. Densely worded, painful, but close. We have met him who plays a kind of fool’s or truth teller’s role. Drunkenness, misogyny, but also the opposite. The protagonists of modern physics (the bomb again), but also a version of the assassination of JFK, all part of the big picture of everything that went and is going wrong. It’s not cheerful, nor optimistic, but not to come from. Parallel, tightly woven into the rest and Bobby’s being is love, lost to a self-chosen death. The young woman’s absence. A grief that cannot be silenced, but can be written. Or something like this, about the future: Knut Ofstad has translated “The Passenger”, and has delivered a brilliant piece of work. As he has done with almost all other McCarthy translations into Norwegian. We have many fine translators in this country. Ofstad and his work with Cormac McCarthy is almost a prime example. The distinctive, changing language, the images, everything stands firm like the rock itself. “Stella Maris” will also arrive soon. Then I think we can talk more about the young woman. news reviews Photo: Gyldendal Title: “The Passenger” Author: Cormac McCarthy Translator: Knut Ofstad Publisher: Gyldendal Genre: Novel Number of pages: 405 Date: October 2022
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“The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy – Reviews and recommendations
