The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
2023 Year of Song and Verse Vol.9
For Shay
Sometimes you can’t lives on plays, nonfiction and poetry, some times you need a novel like you need a goddamn good steak. ~ Me
There are pretty books, some are pretty on the inside, some on the outside sometimes if your lucky they are both… ~Me
I found to my sadness that Cormac McCarthy had passed and in his passing I found that he had left two novels written in 2022. I had not heard of them but since the darkness of The Road, I may have not been looking. While I enjoyed The Road, It left me with the sensation that I didn’t need that much darkness for a while. Yet as I consider Old Country for No Men the great American novel, I thought I would take a chance on The Passenger and Stella Maris.
First my edition from Knopf is glorious. It has great paper, deckled edged, with wonderful dust jackets. The box is gold of an atomic sunrise. When you get to the idea of the cover photo in Stella Maris it sinks your heart a little bit that beauty can contain a bit of darkness. It is a pleasure to read such a volume. The paper and binding is perfect in your hands, it has a beautiful type face. I would recommend the Knopf edition. I could only find it on amazon, but the cover photo is amazing and perfect fit for the volume.
The story focuses on two characters a brother and sister. The first books while contains both siblings, it is is the Bobby Western novel. Bobby is a character that you want to take out to dinner with a good bottle of wine and pay the bill. He is likeable because he is living out his life in spite of giving a large swath of his potential up to be what he is. Bobby is dark in many ways and has a lot of demons to face but he rarely lets them get in his way of doing his job or treating people with a respect he has for humanity.
His sister is intelligent but insane, almost in a mundane way. She is not like others and because of this she can see the world as a thing she can construct. This complicates her relationship with Bobby in many ways.
It ties into ideas of death and suicide covered in the Sunset Limited and The Road. It deals with darkness of end and McCarthy talks about the end of the world almost as a suicide. A central theme is that Bobby and Alicia Western are children of a Manhattan Project Scientist and the bomb, WWII, the Los Alamos team. a
As well physics and math are covered a lot in this semi-historic novel. The science is about as good as McCarthy or most of us could do, but his characters are supposedly very versed in the subject, and he dwells a bit long on time on strings of theory and physics gossip. Oppenheimer gets a very positive portrait as the best of Bomb physicist.
Bobby and Alicia family and their intellect and attractiveness are attributed to the war and the darkness in the world that generated the bomb, and I can not help to think that Cormac was a bit like Prospero with every third thought the grave, there are very many of the same tones as the Sunset Limited scatter through both volumes especially Stella Maris . While there is a lot of darkness in these two novels there is a lot of decency and respect for individual humans if not for humanity as a collective.
There are remnants of his style that carry across all his novels like mundane over detailed descriptions of physical actions of the characters which at this stage after seeing them seem less fresh and less necessary to the plot as they were in No Country For Old Men or The Road, yet this is a small peeve of mine and many will not even see it. He does start dropping a lot of 10 dollar words which were a bit unnecessary toward the end of Stella Maris, but not to much that one could not skip over them or look them up.
Stella Maris focuses on Alicia and is more of a Coda to the Passenger than a stand alone novel but as all good Coda, we are left with a little bit more that fills a void which otherwise would have bogged down the first novel. Alicia is more sane in this novel and also very driven by a few singular motives. I think it is the best look at absurdism in fiction since Camus or Pamuk.
Both novels are wonderful for flaws, and they are the work of an American Master. I am listening to the audio books and I find all the audio books of McCarthy’s oeuvre well done and well read.
RIP Cormac McCarthy , maybe all we can have is a legacy of pages and hopefully ones that are read.
Meta-scores:
The Passenger 87/100
Stella Maris 83/100
