The Passenger

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Julia Whelan

Length: 12 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The first of a two-volume masterpiece, The Passenger series, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road • The story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

"Blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work." —The New York Times

Stella Maris, the second volume in The Passenger series, is available now.

1980, PASS CHRISTIAN, MISSISSIPPI: It is three in the morning when Bobby Western zips the jacket of his wet suit and plunges from the Coast Guard tender into darkness. His dive light illuminates the sunken jet, nine bodies still buckled in their seats, hair floating, eyes devoid of speculation. Missing from the crash site are the pilot’s flight bag, the plane’s black box, and the tenth passenger. But how? A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit—by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.

Traversing the American South, from the garrulous barrooms of New Orleans to an abandoned oil rig off the Florida coast, The Passenger is a breathtaking novel of morality and science, the legacy of sin, and the madness that is human consciousness.

©2022 Cormac McCarthy (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NEW YORK TIMES • GOODREADS • KIRKUS

CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE NOMINEE

“A total banger…[The Passenger] blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work. It’s the first novel I’ve read in years that I feel I need to read three more times to fully understand, and that I want to read three more times simply to savor. It’s so packed with funny, strange, haunted sentences that other writers will be stealing lines from it for epigraphs, as if it were Ecclesiastes, for the next 150 years….The whole thing reads like a cosmic, bleakly funny John D. MacDonald thriller…The Passenger is a great New Orleans novel. It’s a great food novel…For anyone who cares, it’s also a great Knoxville novel—Knoxville being where McCarthy spent most of his childhood. It’s filled with references to his earlier work...A sprawling book of ideas."–Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“A brilliant book… A stunning accomplishment…McCarthy turns his substantial writerly gifts upon two distinct forces: the mechanical and the theoretical. He attends to the exquisite detail of Bobby’s physical world—the sounds and feel of an oil rig in a storm, the touch and clunk of a cigarette machine in a bar, the step-by-step process of removing a bathroom cabinet or digging up and carting off buried treasure…It’s Cormac McCarthy writing as only Cormac McCarthy can.”–Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

“McCarthy has assembled all the chilling ingredients of a locked-room mystery. But he leaps outside the boundaries of that antique form, just as he reworked the apocalypse in The Road… Western knows he’s suspected of something, but he’s not told what. The two men who repeatedly question him never drop their formal politeness—never flash a bolt gun like Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men—but Western knows that his life is in danger and that he must run… The style—a mingling of profound contemplation and rapid-fire dialogue, always without quotation marks and often without attribution—is pure McCarthy.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Hauntingly sad and real

Cormac McCarthy has driven a story and characters who are humorous yet somber with a tinge of depression of realism. To question who you are and if you want to be apart of this world with the burdens that many intelligent persons feel.
This is the story mostly of Bobby Western with snippets of Alicia Western along with her schizophrenia laden ghosts haunting her.
Coupled with the past of their father’s sins that also re-visit time and again stands as a story that will take you on a thought trip within existential wonderment.

Not for everyone

Very Cormac! eloquent in its own way....but alot of endless wandering half lucid dreams etc. Loved it

Seriously? 2 books??

You could slap both books together and 357 pages would easily fall out. I’m sorry I’m never going to find out what happened in the submerged airplane but I just can’t.

Worth the journey. Exceptional prose,

Before I got n The Passenger, I watched a few You Tube reviews and they were very helpful in orienting me. I may have missed , at the beginning , that it is 10 years since Bobby’s beloved sister committed suicide at a sanitarium called Stella Marris. She wanted a total relationship with him, essentially a marriage, but he demurred. Now he is filled with loss, guilt and grief Also, the sister has many conversations with an abusive entity called The Kid. It took me a chapter to realize The Kid was her hallucination.
The general report of the You Tube reviewers, I viewed, was that this is a great novel and McCarthy is today’s best writer in English. . He is 89 years old and apparently spent decades working on this novel, and its adjunct novel, Stella Maris, which is essentially a coda to the Passenger.
Although McCarthy was always a respected writer it wasn’t until his early 70s that he became a huge bestseller internationally. I totally loved his novel “The Road.” You could say Bobby is also on the road, a passenger on Spaceship Earth.
McCarthy likes short, staccato sentences. There were pages I thought he was reading a lot of Raymond Chandler. He is a brilliant descriptive writer and some of his pages are really poetry. We forget many of the novels we have read but I assure you, you will remember this one. McCarthy is a great observer and he can make scenes unforgettable.
He is not afraid to have aa character ask: “Do you believe in God?” Nor write a couple of pages on quantum physics, which I did not understand, but know enough about it to know he had mentioned all the greats of quantum and theoretical physics. Bobby is a salvage underwater diver and McCarthy put in so much technical detail about this work that I felt he was almost boasting about his knowledge. There are also a couple of pages where one character takes apart the Kennedy family and why Oswald could not have killed President Kennedy. Maybe this was s put in to tell us we cannot be sure of anything in life. McCarthy is a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank whose members are mostly scientists with decorates and with much published work. I had the feeling that McCarty hoped, or Alicia hoped, if we could totally understand numbers, we would finally discover what life was and what our life meant. Well, there was Pythagoras and Plato, who said God was geometrician. .
This is a novel that asks a lot of questions but has no answers. Bobby’s family name is Western and I guess this is an echo he of Western Civilization, which according to another character, is going to hell and is doomed. He is John Sheddan and we see him do a lot of drinking and pontificating. Obviously educated and a brilliant speaker he looks on the world with contempt. A sign of a good novel is where you want to argue with its characters. Hey John, what if you are wrong. You really have no proof. You have made a lot of assumptions. . Maybe the world is not going to hell; maybe humanity will find a way. Maybe yours is a coward’s way out. With this type of thinking, being brave or taking risks is useless.
Bobby, though, has proved he is brave. The book never explains why Bobby could not break the incest taboo. Alicia was his one true love. It really does not explain how Bobby and his sister developed such a barren world view. There is wit and jokes but no laughter . Nor does it explain why the IRS has taken so much trouble to get Bobby arrested. Bobby’s father had help ed develop the atomic bomb. But this is the 1970s and the Russian Soviets had already stolen all the atomic secrets they needed. Yet a sinister government organization burgles the family home, stealing everything on paper, including family photo albums. This is a plot device and unconvincing. That was also true for me about All the Pretty Horses. Our hero, not yet a fully-grown teenager, is supposed to win the heart of an older woman, well-educated, and the daughter of a rich Mexican land baron. I could see him serving as a Boy Toy but not a serious lover.
In the book, creating the atomic bomb seems like a great sin against humanity . . It seems to have cursed the physicist father and his children. But their real problem, I think, is the inability to give up their egos, although intellectually they know it doesn’t have reality. They cling to rationality and reason., and science, essentially materialism. . They fear the Great Emptiness.
I cannot resonate with their despair. I am an adult Christian and God has spoken to me. God speaks to everyone who truly searches and wants to listen. . I said “adult Christian,” which means I have given up childish Christianity, for a mystical Christianity. That is what many scientists, the overeducated, the privileged and the cowardly, cannot do. A memorable ride but I don’t buy the arguments of the passengers. Maybe McCarthy should have joined a Zen Center instead of the Santa Fe Institute.

Outstanding story and performance

I had to work for this one. Not so much a novel as a rumination, incrimination, prediction. McCarthy does not disappoint. Whelan and Andrews deliver stellar performances.

Into the Gap

This is a really great novel, the characters are fiery and stay with you. The plot meanders through his old stomping grounds and he paints his beautiful landscape with words.

A beautiful and troubled story

This book is about what it is to be human. Friendship. Loss. Forbidden love. The plot drives the main character but the plot is not really the point. What a masterpiece.

Smart

It's convoluted and long winded but justified by the end. We're all passengers till we decide otherwise.

Phenomenal writing

Cormac has such a wonderful way with words. I read the first half of the book and listened the second half, and must say the audiobook is much better! Hearing this book’s narrators voice the tremendous amount of dialogue really helped clarify who is taking, as the written version contains very little indication and very little punctuation.

Vintage McCarthy

If you are looking for a story driven plot, or even a linear plot, this is not the book. If you want to listen to a great writer eloquently extolling on life’s mysteries through beautifully developed characters in a way that will have you thinking about the themes for days on end, this is McCarthy at his finest.