The return of Cormac McCarthy (Providence, 1933) at the age of eighty-nine and after sixteen without publishing anything –since The Road in 2006 and the play The Sunset Limited that appeared the same year– can be described, for once without exaggeration, as literary event. Who is considered by many to be the best living American writer also reappears with not one, but two novels, which are published here together (in the US they appear in two separate volumes). The two are interconnected by their protagonists, the siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, and each narrates the story of one of them, just as it happened in Salinger's Franny and Zooey.
The Passenger focuses on Bobby in 1980s New Orleans, although Alicia is present in several interspersed chapters in italics. Stella Maris stars Alicia, ten years before her, during her internment in a psychiatric hospital due to her paranoid schizophrenia and the novel consists of her successive conversations with her psychiatrist. The two brothers are united by three elements: incestuous love not necessarily consummated; the obsession with science and philosophy, and finally the sense of guilt they carry because their father was one of the scientists who worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project for the construction of the atomic bomb. This apocalyptic dimension of humanity runs through both novels.
The passenger has an extraordinary double boot. First, in a kind of very brief prologue, it is described how a hunter discovers Alicia's body, that she has committed suicide. This page alone would justify reading the book: it is a sample of McCarthy's distilled and sweeping prose, of Faulknerian stock and with a contained vigor within the reach of very few writers. After the first of the chapters dedicated to Alicia (which reproduce her hallucinations, surrounded by bizarre characters, and are the most debatable and tiresome of this novel), the beginning of Bobby's story is also impressive.
He works as a rescue diver and with a partner they descend to a private plane that has sunk in the sea and discover eight bodies inside. But there is a problem: there should be nine bodies and also the black box has disappeared. Shortly after, Bobby receives a visit from two alleged government agents who ask him questions, there is no trace of the plane crash in the press, one of his friends drowns and he begins to have the feeling that he is being persecuted, never knowing why. what.
It's one of those reader-grabbing outbursts, but it soon becomes clear that McCarthy (in the vein of David Lynch in Twin Peaks) isn't too interested in solving the mystery. Little by little this police plot is diluted and gives way to the escape of the protagonist. A flight full of existential anguish, since he may be able to escape from his pursuers, but never from himself. McCarthy slips into the territory of the Kafkaesque, of the absurd dramas of Harold Pinter, and ends up in the parables full of guilt, sin and destruction of Herman Melville or Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even, in the final pages, biblical echoes appear .
A curiosity: the novel ends in Formentera. This has a biographical explanation: in the sixties of the last century, McCarthy lived in Europe for several years and spent time in Ibiza, so that he knows that environment.
During his escape, Bobby has long conversations with unusual characters, such as a trans woman named Debussy Fields, a magician turned into a detective... In them, scientific disquisitions (on quantum physics) and philosophical disquisitions (on whether it is possible to know reality) appear, and even a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination. At times it seems that we are reading Pynchon or DeLillo instead of McCarthy.
The incorporation of continuous scientific and philosophical references also has a biographical explanation: the writer is a patron of the Santa Fe Institute and apparently has been talking with scientists and philosophers for years, which has led him to insert these debates –sometimes shoehorned– into these novels, whose configuration allows him to give free rein to the lucubrations and disquisitions.
McCarthy came of age as a storyteller with Blood Meridian and the so-called Frontier Trilogy at the end of the 20th century and was propelled into deceptive popularity (which he did not seek and, always reluctant to give interviews, tried to dodge) at the beginning of the 21st with No Country for Old Men (made into a movie by the Coens) and The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel that is undoubtedly the culmination of his career (made into a movie by John Hillcoat). He put down the misleading popularity because he has never been an easy writer, as these two cryptic novels demonstrate.
The defining elements of his literature are still present in them: the stern and sharp prose, the dialogues without a script and often without any boundaries to indicate who is speaking, the taste for oppressive climates, the determination to investigate guilt and sin, violence (here more buried, replaced by anguish)... But these novels tilt towards reflection and speculation –sometimes falling into pure digression– and the interest in exploring the metaphysical dimension of the human being and the great questions about meaning of life, themes already announced by the play The Sunset Limited, meditation on faith and atheism. McCarthy bets very high and walks balanced on the wire between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Without being round novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris contain tons of great literature, served by an unbeatable prose very well translated into Spanish by Luis Murillo Fort. The two Western brothers run away, one physically, the other into madness. His destiny is tragic and can only be redeemed by love, as the desolate and beautiful ending of The Passenger makes clear.
