Off New Orleans in 1980, 37-year-old Robert Western, a former physics doctoral student turned European race car driver, is a professional salvage diver. At the bottom of the water, he finds nine corpses lying in the cabin of a private jet. But the black box—the story of the flight—and a passenger seem to be missing.
It is the first of the haunting mysteries that feed the 500 pages of Passenger, Cormac McCarthy’s eleventh title. There are many more in this complex and disturbing novel, a haunting metaphysical thriller that explores themes of grief, time, quantum physics, the meaning of life and the nature of consciousness.
In love with his sister, Alicia, a mathematical genius of great beauty and tortured by hallucinations until her suicide ten years earlier, Robert knows that “beauty has the power to engender mourning beyond the reach of other tragedies “.
Ever since he had seen her interpret the character of Medea at the age of thirteen, a white cloth gown on her back and a crown of honeysuckle in her hair—in Euripides’ version—he had known that he was lost and that “his life no longer belonged to him”.
Added to this is a layer of angst: brother and sister both seem haunted by the legacy of their father, a physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. And in this sense do not exclude the possibility of a curse.
long silence
Known for his bloody, modern westerns set in the American Southwest — from The darkness outside To blood meridian —, Cormac McCarthy, 89, had not been heard from since the 2006 release of The roadA road trip postapocalyptic which earned him the Pulitzer Prize and a huge global success.
Sixteen years later, he came back in quick succession with two novels, The passenger And Stella Maris (to be published in translation in June). A diptych quite different from the previous books of this reader of Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Melville and Greek tragedians, whose novels often draw on an inventory of crimes straight out of the Old Testament: murder, rape, cannibalism, necrophilia, incest .
Along with Salinger and Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy is one of the quietest pillars of American literature, having granted only a handful of interviews since the publication of his first novel, The guardian of the orchardin 1965.
Alicia’s hallucinatory “visions” in The passenger, will echo the erratic itinerary of Bobby Western, pursued as much by the American authorities as by the ghost of his sister. A drift that will take him to Idaho, Wyoming and Wisconsin – where Alicia was interned – from abandoned cabins to motel rooms, driving his Maserati or an old pickup.
His escape will lead him to Formentera, a Balearic island located opposite Ibiza, in the attic of an old mill, where he will hopelessly seek to sleep off his unspeakable pain and be forgotten by the world. “All the good in the world is not enough to erase a disaster. Only a worse catastrophe manages to erase it. »
Better still: “The truth of the world constitutes such a terrifying vision that it makes prophecies pale in the most gloomy of omens that the Earth has ever borne. Once admitted, the idea that all of this will one day be blown to dust and scattered into nothingness becomes less of a prophecy than a promise. »
A “real epidemic of mysteries”, a sumptuous novel almost without violence. But dark, terribly dark. A kind of nihilistic testament crossed by a deep and irremediable loneliness.