The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
Bobby Western jumps from the Coast Guard tender into the dark at three in the morning after zipping up his wet suit jacket. Nine people are still fastened in their seats, with hair floating and eyes empty of speculation, when his dive light illuminates the sunken jet. The tenth passenger, the black box of the aircraft, and the pilot’s flight bag are all missing from the crash site. Yet how? Western is haunted in body and spirit by men with badges, the ghost of his father, the man who created the bomb that burned glass and flesh in Hiroshima, and his sister, who is both his soul’s love and its ruin. Western is a collateral witness to plots that can only lead to his injury.
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
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The Passenger is a magnificent story about morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the insanity that is human awareness that traverses the American South, from the boisterous bars of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the coast of Florida.
Bobby Western is a fantastic character, and because of his nomadic lifestyle, he meets plenty of interesting people who are also fantastic supporting characters. This book is jam-packed with interesting conversations about a range of subjects that show off Bobby’s brilliance, including arithmetic, physics, auto racing, diving, and more.
And watching over everything is Alicia, Bobby’s sister and an even more brilliant person. We get a glimpse of her through the numerous hallucinations she experiences, which are discussed at the beginning of the majority of the chapters in this book, but we also discover more about her through Bobby’s sorrow over her passing and the clues of their unrequited love.
The novel opens with a scene that could signal the start of a mystery or thriller. A group of salvage divers descends into the Gulf of Mexico to look into a missing jet. The individuals who hired them had no explanation and don’t appear to want one when they discover all but one of the passengers dead in their seats. Then team members begin to pass away or vanish. But there is no resolution. At least not the mystery that is introduced at the start of the book, solving it is not the focus of the book. It deals with a lot more universal issues.
This work has little to no typical dramatic structure and concentrates exclusively on the big issues. However, since it is McCarthy, you can’t help but be engrossed in the dialogue and all the historical, scientific, and mathematical details that accompany it…
