“Le Passager” (The Passenger), by Cormac McCarthy, translated from English (United States) by Serge Chauvin, L’Olivier, 544 p., €24.50, digital 18 €, (in bookstores March 3).
Western. The hero is called Bobby Western. This diver with the name of cinema and the West specializes in the exploration of wrecks. He is also a brother in love with his sister. She committed suicide. His hanging body, covered with frost, opens The passenger, the new novel by Cormac McCarthy. Ten years later, a plane falls into the sea. Bobby manages to get inside. The plane is intact, but it is missing, precisely, a passenger. Begin “an epidemic of mysteries”.
A brilliant physicist (it’s in the family: his father, a Jewish refugee in the United States, is one of the creators of the atomic bomb), Western does not reach the mathematical genius of his dead sister. Two things will always escape him: the “deep heart of the number” et the “women’s soul”not to mention “feminine intuition” pursued by Debbie, his trans girlfriend. Yet Western has all the talents: women want him, he reads quantum physics in French, he knows how to choose a wine and how to use a gun, he drives faster than everyone with his Maserati, he is a champion of mourning like there is a fasting champion in Kafka. We can be annoyed by his visionary wisdom on what will become of our world – the action is set in 1980. And we do not escape a few generalities in this beautiful man’s novel which recomposes the atoms of Gothic melodrama (the crazy in the attic, brother-sister love, ghosts) with those of the American road trip (the cars, the marginalized, the immense space where the soul spins). But, at 89, Cormac McCarthy has the right to afford a superhero.
I hate that incest, burning heart of Passenger, or romanticized à la Faulkner. Bobby Western is a tortured and torturing brother, like Quentin in The Sound and Fury (Gallimard, 1938), or Pierre at Melville (Pierre or the Ambiguities, 1852). But fiction never killed anyone, and it’s fortunate that in 2023 novel characters are still allowed to have fantasies and do illegal things. And I like the freedom with which McCarthy invents a non-story that allows him to run all his horses: between a reflection on liberalism – “It’s not by selling your time that you will become rich” – and another on ecology – « The ivory-billed woodpecker (…) disappeared forever” – he wrote a treatise on the bomb, an account of the Vietnam War, a love song to the feline race, a culinary guide to New Orleans, a theory on the assassination of Kennedy… I forget some .
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