A sunken wreck of a novel: Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger reviewed

Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow.

The great beasts of American literature have often aimed for prose that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike. Though there were always intensely mannered novelists in England, they had less of a heroically manly quality – Firbank, Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. There are certainly novelists at work now with a beautiful command of style, such as Peter Carey or Colson Whitehead, but few for whom style is everything, and most, like McCarthy, are getting on a bit.

Amis proposed an amusing critical game when thinking about authors of this sort: to write a sentence that they could never write. His example was the impossibility of Ivy Compton-Burnett writing: ‘That’s a pretty dress you’ve got on.’ With McCarthy, the game is simpler. It is almost impossible to imagine him writing the word ‘however’.

His clauses are hammered together with brutal simplicity, and his invariable choice of conjunction is simply ‘and’. The things of the world amass agglutinatively, piling up but hardly ever modifying each other with a simple ‘but’, or seeing how actions and facts affect what follows. The result has a compelling, fierce power; it is often compared to the prose in the Bible, or to Faulkner. To an English reader it bears an unexpected similarity to Henry Green at his most mannered, the incantatory style that C.M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta introduced. Much of this incantation is brought to bear on scenes of hideous, senseless violence, as in the following passage from Blood Meridian:

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The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. Two thick ropes of dark blood and two slender rose like snakes from the stump of his neck and arched hissing into the fire. The head rolled to the left and came to rest at the ex-priest’s feet where it lay with eyes aghast. Tobin jerked his foot away and rose and stepped back. The fire steamed and blackened and a gray cloud of smoke rose and the columnar arches of blood slowly subsided until just the neck bubbled gently like a stew and then that too was stilled.

McCarthy’s ancient Olivetti typewriter was auctioned in 2009 and made $254,500. I don’t wonder. I can’t imagine a more physical embodiment of a literary style: a machine where every key had to be banged down hard.

The style, like all styles, has its limitations. In a series of much acclaimed novels from Blood Meridian onwards, McCarthy has written about humanity at its most extreme, from the almost genocidal murder spree as America spread westwards in the 1850s, the lawless improvisations chronicled in The Border Trilogy and a lavishly horrible restaging of a Chaucer fable of money and death in No Country for Old Men. His themes of manliness and unfettered violence, and his casual expressions about race especially, would get any new American writer into serious trouble (‘They were followed by packs of wolves, coyotes, Indians’). Nevertheless, McCarthy appears to be loved by the most sedulously liberal readers, who as far as I can see haven’t even complained about his use of the N-word. Sometimes this requires some ingenuity. The Road is set in an America after what is pretty clearly a nuclear attack – ‘a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions’ result in a ceaseless fall of dust. It has been repeatedly and bizarrely recast as a description of the eventual effects of climate change. McCarthy is an extraordinarily plain and direct writer, but his impact on readers does not take simple forms.

His latest work, the first for a very long time, is an oddity: a two-novel sequence (a duology, I suppose). I will say straight away that the second novel, Stella Maris, is a disaster. It consists of nothing but sessions between one of the characters and a hospital psychiatrist. It’s a terrible idea to get a character to undergo detailed analysis by a professional, the equivalent of the beginner novelist’s device of having a character stop in front of a mirror and describe their appearance. It adds very little to the first volume, and has the unfortunate effect of focusing one’s doubts. I’m going to suggest putting Stella Maris aside altogether.

The Passenger has a fairly well-worn thriller premise. A commercial diver, Bobby Western, is sent to investigate a plane that has crashed into the sea. He finds seven passengers and two crew. (The underwater company inspires a repetition of a familiar McCarthy nightmare image, going as far back as the head of Captain White in a jar of mescal in Blood Meridian, ‘hair afloat and eyes turned upward in a pale face’.) There should, however, be eight passengers. Back on land, officials arrive. Quite soon Western finds that the forces of the state seem intent on placing him under arrest, with his assets seized by the tax authorities and imprisonment a real possibility. His fellow diver is killed in an unnecessary accident. Western goes on the run. But who was the eighth passenger?

Alongside this, and only functioning as a periodically useful deus ex machina, is Bobby’s dead sister Alicia. She was a genius; there is suspicion that she and Bobby were sexually entwined. She was also mad. Between the chapters of Bobby’s story there are episodes from Alicia’s psychosis. She is visited by a gang of hallucinated beings, led by a grotesque called the Kid. McCarthy’s dedication to using the most offensive terms about minorities bears fruit. These chapters are sour and repulsive, as the voice describes the Kid’s thalidomide-formed body: ‘Except of course they weren’t really hands. Just flippers. Sort of like a seal has.’ More grotesques turn up later, including a pair of ‘blackface minstrels’ saying ‘Yassuh yassuh’. They are quite amusing in small doses. I rather enjoyed it when Alicia, having been subjected to electroshock therapy, is visited by a blackened, burnt and angry Kid – but small doses is not what we get.

The novel heads on and expands into more general catastrophes, redeemed only by the continuing power of that incantatory manner. The Westerns’ father, it emerges, was responsible for working on the atom bombs dropped on Japan. This revelation has some effects on the novel, none very admirable. A paragraph on the horrors of Hiroshima seems routinely dropped in (‘burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium’). There are conversations about what I’ve come to think of as ‘novelists’ science’, not really intended to be understood: ‘A lot of people thought that S-Matrix theory was a reasonable theory. Promising, even. It was just superseded by chromodynamics.’ Alicia emerges as a child prodigy of a very routine sort – she is a mathematician and a virtuoso on the violin (of course), who is recognised, aged 13, as a world expert on baroque violin makers. Just for once couldn’t one of these fictional prodigies be really good at the bassoon?

A skilled editor might have cut some of the grosser absurdities, such as a diversion into Kennedy assassination conspiracies, quite unrelated to anything else. And there are some startlingly banal exchanges:

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Make it two, he said. Two what. Hamburgers. He’s having a cheeseburger. Okay. Cheeseburger. Sure. Everything? Yeah. Fries? Fries.

But here we come close to a dangerous area for the editor, because the off-point, idly time-wasting material, apparently irrelevant to theme, plot or argument, provides stretches of compelling mastery.

The glory of this novel comes in a succession of scenes in bars. Old drinking pals with nothing to do josh and tease and spin long-polished tales to their half-sozzled familiars: Long John, a bar-room walking thesaurus (a type as old as Pistol, Falstaff’s crony), Darling Dave, Seals, Bianca Pharaoh and Debussy Fields, the wonderfully self-christened transgender woman with a thing for Bobby. The characters are beautifully done, as good as V.S. Pritchett, and the reader feels a tender regret at John’s end that is never a possibility in Alicia’s tragedy.

In these chapters we glimpse a much more powerful and affecting novel – one that, without the trappings of conspiracy and last-minute rescues from disaster (in other words, the plot), brings the mysteries of age, decay, death and missed opportunities for love into focus through the rambling, drunk conversations heard in a shabby bar. Like too many American novelists, McCarthy has been misled by a conviction that he needs to say something important. He should have reflected that what lives forever is Miss Bates on Box Hill in Emma, or the unnamed young man in Our Mutual Friend who, trying to exercise his French, says ‘Esker...?’, never to reappear. Debussy Fields might have been among the immortals. Now she sinks with a great wreck of a book that goes on and on about string theory, who killed Kennedy and all the rest. A waste of a great talent.