The proof copy of The Passenger heralds its own arrival, sixteen years after the release of Cormac McCarthy’s previous novel, The Road (2006). This is, we are told, “A GLOBAL LITERARY EVENT”. The attendant publicity material offers this stark lead-in to the synopsis: “A SUNKEN JET. NINE PASSENGERS. A MISSING BODY”. No doubt the intention is to bring in audiences who may only be familiar with the author through the propulsive and wildly successful adaptation, by the Coen brothers, of McCarthy’s cat-and-mouse thriller No Country for Old Men (2005). The reality, however, is that The Passenger and its short “coda”, Stella Maris (which will be published in December), are simply not good introductions to Cormac McCarthy’s work.

This isn’t to say they’re unsatisfying or disappointing or otherwise defective. But they are definitely best appreciated in conversation with the author’s broader oeuvre: they are books for the completist. Indeed, these novels are so deeply engaged with the rest of his corpus that they represent something like a steadily accumulated stack of postcards kept in the glovebox: a reminder of places seen, stories exchanged; friends met, friends lost. For McCarthy is now eighty-nine and this is, very likely, his arrival al fin del camino.

When the New York Times announced the novels’ release dates in March of this year, it noted that McCarthy had first submitted his completed manuscript for Stella Maris, and an unfinished draft of The Passenger, to his publisher seven years previously. Thanks to a leaked recording from the Santa Fe Institute (a theoretical research body where McCarthy has worked for many years, and on whose board he sits), released at around the same time as these submissions, fans have for some time known that the books would feature a young, female maths whizz in conversation with her therapist, and would touch on ideas with which McCarthy has been ever more concerned in recent years: science, philosophy and linguistics. David Krakauer, the institute’s president and a close friend of the author, told those present when the recording was made to expect “full-blown Cormac 3.0”. Then, radio silence. Before the New York Times announcement, even the most devout Cormackians had all but given up hope of seeing the books published in the author’s lifetime. The wait, however, represents but a fraction of their total gestation period, which began several decades ago.

As the scholar Dianne C. Luce tells us in her essay “Creativity, Madness, and ‘the light that dances deep in Pontchartrain’”(The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Volume 18, No 2, 2020), the initial inspiration for The Passenger came to the author by way of a poem he had heard while living in Chicago in the early 1960s. The poem – “never writ down” at the time the author heard it – relates the life of the clarinettist Leon Roppolo, a revolutionary jazz soloist whose short life and remarkable talents were rent by drug abuse, schizoid-type mental health issues and periods of institutionalization. Roppolo died aged forty-one in 1943. “When the last hat is ransomed from the shelf”, the poem grimly concludes, “Home is where you hang yourself.”

It is likely, too, that McCarthy also had in mind, as another emblem of brilliance and lost potential, the author Leslie Garrett, to whom he had been introduced by his second wife, Anne DeLisle, while he was living in Ibiza in 1966. At the time Garrett seemed to be on a similar trajectory to that of McCarthy. Both had recently garnered some critical praise for their first novels, and awards. For The Beasts (1966), Garrett won the Maxwell Perkins award, while McCarthy had just received two successive windfalls, one courtesy of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the other from the Rockefeller Foundation. Garrett, though, lacked McCarthy’s focus and was caught up with the hedonism of his early success, something that ill suited his bipolar disorder. The following year, having completed a final draft of his second book, Outer Dark (1968), McCarthy made plans to return to the US with DeLisle. Before departing he warned Garrett that any promise his friend held as a novelist would be scuppered if he could not rein himself in. The pair parted ways, leaving each other to forge their own paths.

Set in and around New Orleans in 1980, The Passenger is as close to a memoir as McCarthy has come since the chaotic brilliance of Suttree (1979), in which the reader is yanked by the ear and taken on a drunken, often hallucinogenic whistlestop tour of the seediest dives that 1950s Knoxville had to offer. Early on in the new book our protagonist, Bobby Western, a salvage diver, fetches up in a bar in New Orleans’s French Quarter (where McCarthy lived for a time), and is greeted by a regular crew of carousers and reprobates. The dialogue here is as coarse and funny as anything McCarthy – whose humour is often unrecognized – has written in decades, and it reads as if it was recorded yesterday. John “the Long one” Sheddan is Western’s closest friend, and he gets many of the book’s best lines, such as when he recounts running into an old girlfriend, having recently been released from jail after a “slight contretemps’’ with the authorities:

Why John, she says, is that you? … Where have you been? And I said: My dear, I have been in durance vile. And she said: Really? You know my sister married a boy from Winston-Salem. And I thought to myself: I really need to get out of this town.

Sheddan is genially ruthless with Western, and takes some pleasure in prodding his friend on his life and maudlin philosophy. And despite his louche and gregarious affect, he proves to be a perspicacious and sincere confidant. What Sheddan knows is that Western is “broken on the wheel of devotion”, eternally preoccupied with memories of his dead sister, Alicia. When Western becomes entangled in a nebulous plot surrounding the downed plane – which is inexplicably missing its black box, the pilot’s flight bag and one occupant – the torment of this loss acts as a paralytic on him. “He knew that he should wonder what was to become of him.” Only a mere bystander to the conspiracy, he nevertheless finds himself quietly driven out of work, away from his friends and into a pitiful destitution.

McCarthy knows how to write indomitable villains: there is the “grim triune” of Outer Dark, a group of barbarous riders in pursuit of a child born of incest; Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985), the oracle of eternal violence; and the tireless hitman of No Country, “the invincible Mr Chigurh”. As memorable and idiosyncratic as these characters are, each exists as an avatar of fate and a symbol of the illusion of choice, twin subjects that course through McCarthy’s oeuvre. Heroes battle on, ignorant of the fact that their destiny has long since been decided by prior actions, even those that initially seemed of little consequence; the sturdy resolution of those who endeavour to change their lives inevitably crumbles when they are faced with the expanse and gravity of forces beyond their comprehension. McCarthy’s interest in these ideas ranges from the individual to the eternal: what does the toss of one coin mean? Nothing, or everything. Who makes the call?

In The Passenger, though, the author requires no flesh-and-blood antagonist. The simplicity of face-to-face confrontation is not afforded to Western, who is instead persecuted by the creeping, methodical apparatus of the state. This is Cold War McCarthy, oscillating between a high pitch of American paranoia and a low, pounding sense of dread. Don DeLillo would be proud. There are lengthy discussions about the use of psyops in Vietnam (swiped, one might notice, from Michael Herr’s Dispatches, 1977), the assassination of JFK and the rise of private digital currencies. At one level or another McCarthy has been building to a book like The Passenger throughout his work, with its repeated glimpses of the Atomic Age and its widespread impacts.

Western’s father is revealed as a nameless scientist who was present at, and in part responsible for, what McCarthy’s oeuvre has often pointed to as being one of the most consequential moments in modern human history: 5.29am on July 16, 1945, the first successful detonation of a nuclear device, Trinity:

Three. Two. One. Then the sudden whited meridian. Out there the rocks dissolving into a slag that pooled over the melting sands of the desert. Small creatures crouched aghast in that sudden and unholy day and then were no more. What appeared to be some vast violetcolored creature rising up out of the earth where it had thought to sleep its deathless sleep and wait its hour of hours.

The members of the Manhattan Project felt they had made history, but to McCarthy they were simply a logical component of its progress. So proclaimed Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, set almost 100 years before the explosion:

It makes no difference what men think of war … War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

The speech, delivered to a ragged band of scalp-hunters on a dark stretch of mesa not unlike the testing site of New Mexico, has echoed down through the years, and McCarthy has demonstrated a keen ear for its reverberations. Take Billy Parham, the young, beleaguered hero of The Crossing (1994), who in the book’s final pages becomes an unknowing witness to the Test. He awakes in the desert, startled by an inconceivable light, which in a few moments is “drawing away faster and that noon in which he’d woke was now become an alien dusk and now an alien dark”. He waits there until “after a while the east did grey and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again”. In the final book of the Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain (1998), Billy and John Grady Cole (the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses, 1992) find their lives as vaqueros under threat as the land surrounding their ranch is piecemeal seized by the US government under the protocol of “eminent domain”, which forced landowners to sell up to make way for the expansion of the atomic testing grounds. And though McCarthy insists that the nature of the cataclysm that has charred earth, sea and sky in The Road is irrelevant to the story, it would be senseless not at least partly to view it in the context of his corpus’s broader nuclear anxiety. The author indicates, in just one word, that in the ash left over those remaining will bear witness to God’s final departure from the world: “The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth”. “Salitter” is borrowed from Jakob Böhme, the seventeenth-century German mystic from whom McCarthy also took the epigraph for Blood Meridian. It is the very essence of the Creator, and here the author imagines it turned to grey ash by the blinding power of a new and terrible god, hand-forged.

McCarthy’s engagement with the nuclear era can also be detected in the changes to his prose style over the decades. Fans are often divided between those who favour the baroque maximalism of his early works and those who prefer the pared-back, often staccato rhythm of his later period. In a book such as Outer Dark, heavy with a dark, lyrical Romanticism, the characters belong to the rich landscape. Later we find the opposite to be the case, with God’s children grown cold: intoxicated by mechanization, driven further and further away from nature, and further still from one another. Small wonder, McCarthy seems to say, that men would eventually be found “[detonating] bombs capable of reducing fairly large parcels of the known world to uninhabitable rubble”, as Alicia has it.

Formally and stylistically The Passenger is something of a chimera for McCarthy. The main narrative arc is very much of the later period, with a detached tone suited to Western’s increasingly numbed affect, yet featuring jerky skips in time and place not used since The Orchard Keeper (1965). As the faceless, nameless “They” pursue him, and Western’s future becomes ever more uncertain, he leans back into the familiarity of his memories and family history: the story of his great-grandparents’ house in Tennessee, “All of it hand planed. All of it at the bottom of a lake”; of his mother and father meeting at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; of Alicia, aged thirteen, performing Medea in an abandoned quarry, as he watched “heart in his throat. His life no longer his”. The crisp writing of these sections is in turn offset by their preludes, which follow his sister in the years between her early adolescence and her final stint at Stella Maris, an asylum in rural Wisconsin.

In an interview in the Wall Street Journal in 2009, McCarthy, detailing some of the broad plot points of these new books, admitted that he had never felt “competent enough” to write a female lead character, adding, “but at some point you have to try”. Anyone even loosely acquainted with McCarthy’s works might reasonably ask: do you? Women, it has been widely noted, do not fare well in McCarthy’s books. They are rarely fleshed-out and their primary narrative purpose is either to frustrate the hero’s ambitions (see Duena Alfonsa in All the Pretty Horses) or to lead him to his death (see Magdalena in Cities of the Plain). Sometimes it’s both, as with Malinka in his screenplay for The Counsellor (2013), who was the most recent and, in many ways, most egregious example of this. An unintentionally parodic femme fatale, she owns two pet cheetahs (maybe the most leaden metaphor in McCarthy’s entire published works) and, as a display of dominance, has sex with the windshield of a Ferrari. Finally she plays the men for fools, steals the cash and drives off into the sunset.

Alicia might be considered something of a tragic overcorrection. Viewed from a certain angle she is not so hard done by. She is, we are told, very beautiful and very thin; she arrives at Stella Maris with $40,000 in a plastic bag. A brilliant, erudite prodigy with a photographic recall, synaesthesia and perfect pitch, she can talk about mathematics, metaphysics and game theory; she knows G. K. Chesterton’s theories about Satan and Carl Jung’s ideas about dreams; away from her prime occupation, which is the study of topos theory, she is a self-taught expert in nuclear physics, consciousness, the nature of language and violin construction. She can read a clock in the mirror and write paragraphs of justified text, both without conscious effort. She is, however – there was always going to be a “however” – schizophrenic and deeply, obsessively in love with her brother.

The Passenger opens with the discovery of Alicia’s body on a “cold and barely spoken” Christmas morning in 1972, the day before her twenty-first birthday. Most of the chapters begin with short flashbacks from her final years – a spectre hanging above her brother’s later downfall. Stella Maris, meanwhile, covers Alicia’s self-admitted six-week stay at the facility and takes the form of a dialogue between her and her therapist. (The Santa Fe leak was accurate). Alicia has gone to Stella Maris following her flight from Italy, where doctors have recently requested permission to pull the plug on the then comatose Bobby, who has been critically injured in a racing car accident. He wakes up shortly after her death.

Already a precocious and saturnine child, from the onset of her first period, Alicia had begun to receive visitations from the “Horts”, a gang of vivid hallucinatory characters whose troupe leader – short, scarred and flipper-armed – is referred to as the Thalidomide Kid. The Horts allow McCarthy to put his foot down creatively, and there is a real sense that he has had great fun writing these scenes. The Kid talks almost incessantly, yet speaks “As if he’d found the language somewhere and wasnt all that sure what to do with it”. An embodiment of some aspect of Alicia’s subconscious, he is one of the few things she cannot make sense of, yet his embedded nature provides the assumption of some necessity and purpose. What that might be is tricky to discern from the garbled idioms and volatile wordplay: “There could be a quiz on the qualia, so keep that in mind. True false on the interalia, four wrong and we fail ya”. Any meaning Alicia can extract does little to distract her from her encounters with some wholly terrifying truth at the heart of mathematics, which leads her into “ideas that to [Bobby] threatened to abandon reality of any kind he’d a stake in”. As well as mathematics, Alicia’s wide interests are, clearly, also McCarthy’s; some of her arguments about the nature of language come word for word from McCarthy’s essay of 2017 for Nautilus, “The Kekulé Problem”. (A couple of minor-ish gaffes slip through, mind, where McCarthy’s wide reading has zipped past Alicia’s. For example, she claims to have come to Stella Maris because she couldn’t get into Coletta, the institution where Joe Kennedy sent his bipolar daughter Rosemary “after they scooped her brains out”. But the Kennedys closely guarded the secret of Rosemary’s lobotomy until the late 1980s. She mentions, too, that Bach wrote part of his Partita for Violin No. 2 in remembrance of his wife – a theory that wasn’t published until 1992.)

Nitpicking aside, these books are a moving final tribute to the panoply of thinkers who have provided the foundation for the wild and varied worlds of McCarthy’s fiction. They are, for all their harshness, pessimism and frenzy, the last of a stretch of deeply humble, occasionally elegiac novels, and clearly indebted as much to McCarthy’s Nobel prize-winning friend, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, as they are to the down-and-outs he knew throughout his younger, peripatetic years.

After a lengthy absence, Leslie Garrett returned to writing in the early 1990s. He had spent most of the interceding years off the rails, including a suicide attempt in the early 1970s. A review of In the Country of Desire in the Los Angeles Times (August 2, 1992) called it a “masterpiece”, concluding: “If the reviewer is allowed a desire of her own here, it is that Leslie Garrett’s mental and physical health will flourish so that his compulsion to write can continue to prevail”. Sadly, this desire was impossible to satisfy: Garrett died of throat cancer the following June. Copies of his published works are now hard to come by. A final acknowledgement came in 2016, when he was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement award at the annual East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame ceremony. His friend and fellow Knoxvillian, the writer Don Williams, delivered the acceptance speech. In it he noted that among Garrett’s papers was a letter from McCarthy: the two had stayed in touch, and McCarthy was best man at Garrett’s wedding. The letter Williams found was sent not long after the 1992 National Book Awards, won by All the Pretty Horses. Prior to that accolade McCarthy was still a “writer’s writer” (David Foster Wallace was an enthusiastic early admirer); his works were mostly out of print and he eked out a subsistence thanks to grants, patrons and the diligent support of his editor, Albert Erskine, who also died in 1993. The NBA was the making of McCarthy: a long-awaited recognition of his talents and a welcome financial boon. Yet, in his letter to Garrett, Williams recounted, McCarthy wrote: “in as many words, ‘It should have been you, old friend’”.

George Berridge is an editor at the TLS

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