Books of the Month: Cormac McCarthy

After a 16- year absence, Cormac McCarthy returns with not one, but two new works. While Alan Bett finds that the author’s prose remains superb, his payoffs may not wholly satisfy

Sin. Some original, some more contemporary. As with many of Cormac McCarthy’s past works, sin informs the narrative of his long-awaited new books. We’ll leave the bus analogies to others, but after an extended pause following The Road in 2006, two novels from the legendary author have turned up at once. Well, one full novel (The Passenger) and a shorter follow-up (Stella Maris), described as a coda, but feeling very much a key to the former.

The Passenger is packaged as a standard thriller. Bobby Western is a salvage diver operating around the Gulf Of Mexico. His most recent job has a troubling mystery at its core: a sunken jet full of belted-in bodies. The numbers don’t add up. A passenger is missing, along with the flight bag and black box. As a result, Western is pursued by nameless agents of the state. But this chase story evolves into something quite different and difficult to define; it moves from tangible to existential threats, ghosts from the past and family trauma. The narrative slows and spreads, becomes a philosophical musing that is not always coherent.

McCarthy’s prose is, as ever, first rate. The playful deceit of The Passenger’s initial genre framing is occasionally given away by moments of sparse and staccato poetry. And while the majority of the main narrative is told in a clean, standard beat, it’s interspersed by chapters that are more freeform such as the conversations between Western’s institutionalised sister, Alicia, and an imagined retinue of characters. They are the result of an extreme personality disorder, a condition dealt with in a creative but not always sensitive fashion. In addition, Alicia’s beauty and genius are incessantly referenced, in a way that leaves her as a slightly totemic presence. Yet she finds a stronger, perhaps not always reliable, narrative voice in Stella Maris, a series of mathematics and philosophy-focused conversations between her and a psychologist.

Both books are dialogue heavy, Stella Maris being entirely that and the majority of The Passenger made up of bar-room and restaurant parleys between Western and a cast of hard-boiled characters. Some are built organically into the narrative while others feel parachuted in as sounding boards for Bobby’s ruminations on life’s big questions. The laconic wisdom and sharp turns of phrase from previous books are, however, often matched in these sharp tête-à-têtes.

There is a challenge in comparing such a distinctive writer to any other; easier instead to loop back and compare them to earlier versions of themselves. So, as with No Country For Old Men, the stain of past violence seeps into the present here, in this case with the incomparably violent energy from splitting the atom. Western’s father was part of the team that developed the atomic bomb alongside Oppenheimer, that destroyer of worlds. Of course, it’s a seismic historical moment, and this book exists in its aftershock. It acts as metaphor. A big bang, spawning a troubled new era that the author regularly references across both books: Vietnam, the space race, JFK.

McCarthy once more attempts to interrogate the soul of his country, or at the very least offer melancholy reflections. He works the reader hard, with payoffs that will satisfy some but not all. However, at 89 years of age, the author has the perspective to inform a singular voice.

The Passenger is out now with Stella Maris out on Tuesday 22 November; both are published by Picador.