"You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole." — Fichte, The Vocation of Man (1800)
I must've been dozing off in the interim between just last month and October of 2022 when Cormac McCarthy's, The Passenger was published. McCarthy hadn't published anything since 2006, with the release of The Road, a poignant tale of sacrifice and perseverance as a father and son journey through a post-apocalyptic world.
McCarthy died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in June of 2023. His passing was one of the few celebrity deaths that have left me staggered. Deaths that I can count on one hand. They're the passings that have never really passed; Steve Prefontaine, Muhammad Ali, Anthony Bourdain and, most recently, McCarthy. Count them on one hand and still retain the all important middle finger? Bourdain would approve of that retention. I'm still processing his death.
McCarthy's demise came as no surprise really. He was 89, and apparently hadn't published a single syllable in over a decade. Radio silence, as the saying goes. Retired? Ill? Addled? As the years passed since The Road, I'd resigned myself to the idea that Cormac had reached the end of the road. The party was over.
Fooled me. He'd been teasing the McCarthy party attendees about The Passenger since before publication of The Road. News to me. I guess my invitation to the party got lost somewhere along the road.
I finally heard about The Passenger a few weeks ago on a random Facebook post, which goes to show that every now and then something worthwhile comes from Zuckerberg's monster. (Yes, I partake. It's like being a drunk with a craving for cheap vodka. You know you shouldn't but every now and then you lust after the burn.)
The Passenger is just like McCarthy's previous works. That is, it can be a tough read. If your thing is Harry Potter or Bicycling with Butterflies then step away from Cormac. McCarthy's novels can be dark and violent. His Blood Meridian is so grisly and graphic that every attempt at adaptation, even by directors the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, and Todd Field, have ended with hands thrown up in frustration. Blood Meridian has been dubbed unfilmable, though word has it that John Hillcoat who directed The Road is making a run at it. I'm dubious. I'd held my breath for the previous attempts so, as the song goes, I "won't get fooled again."
The Cormac reader, particularly the novice, has to be persistent. Just when it seems as if the author has gone down a haphazard, eternal rabbit hole, and it's time to cut your losses, set the book aside and move on to something more satisfying, his seemingly wayward journey finds a marvelous destination. It isn't unlike wondering where Keith Jarrett has been going on his piano for ten minutes right up until you hear the notes that cleave your soul.
And then there's the matter of dialog - period. McCarthy's works are full of dialog. It's not unusual for an entire chapter, and then the next, and then the next to be almost completely dedicated to dialog, leaving action in almost total obscurity. There's a certain genius in being able to hold the reader in rapture over page after page after page of conversation.
McCarthy can be confounding from the very first word. The Passenger starts off begging for the reader's indulgence as it begins with one of the main characters, the schizophrenic Alicia Western, who's had an incestuous relationship with her brother Bobby, in conversation with one of the demons haunting her schizoid head, an impish, misshapen creature with flippers for hands, who goes by the name Thalidomide Kid. The conversation is all in italics and has the reader wondering just what in the fuck McCarthy up to.
Readers (and writers) might find McCarthy's avoidance of the so-called rules of writing annoying, sacrilegious, and, well, difficult to get accustomed to. The Passenger is full of dialog and there is not one single solitary quotation mark in the entire book. In the middle of any particular conversation in the book, I find myself having to backtrack by a few paragraphs to sort out who's talking. It's not unlike re-centering the Google map on a phone.
All of the above was just a very roundabout way of getting to a distant point that has almost no relevance to everything you, the reader, has just read.
And the point is?
No comments:
Post a Comment