'The Passenger' by Cormac McCarthy

 At first you take this novel to be a thriller with the added ingenuity of a locked room mystery.  In this case the ‘room’ is a sunken jet plane that divers Bobby Western and Oiler (Euler?) have been hired to investigate.  They go down and have to cut open the door to find 9 bodies within and both the avionics and the black box missing.  Clearly the Tenth passenger whom we learn was on the manifest has departed with these vital sources of information about the flight’s origin, route etc.  Bobby later hires a boat and discovers that an obscure cove might have been the landing point of a dinghy.  Then mysterious and sinister comedic FBI type duo turn up and question Western.  You have to admit that the scene is set for a paranoid adventure into the heartland of American conspiracy.   We are set up for an unfolding with some metaphysics but with a swerve nothing is unbound.

The preamble remains and it breaks the Chekovian rule about the introduction of a gun in the first act.  Thank you Hedda Gabler for reminding us.  That neat parcel of inscrutability remains sealed and we are off on a different track which introduces the Tenth Man or the self of the inquirer in the Vedanta parable.

 The Tenth Man relates how a party of 10 travelers were crossing a dangerous river. Having got over the leader of the group counted them to see if everybody was safely over. He counted nine and began to bewail the missing one until a passer by reminded him - ‘you have forgotten to count yourself, you are the tenth man’.

Bobby Western is bemused by his image in the eyes of others, those that have traveled with him in his past, in his family’s past and in the fixed presence of his sister’s hallucinations.  He counts them and in his mesmerised totting of his accounts is caught in a circle particularly by the love for his sister his anima and now the source of emotional stasis.  If he gets past that he feels that he may lose himself.  Such is the nature of botched accountancy.  

The cast of the book represents the facets of Western’s relation to his world; literary, historical, Manhattan Project, conspiracy, family and transgenderism.  In a series of conversations and the book is largely conversational the fractions of Bobby add up to less than 1 or less than 10 if you wish.  

Conclusion: There is no conclusion and you are led to expect there may be.  A bum steer or ‘if I was going there I wouldn’t start from here’ is irritating and to travel hopefully and not to arrive though the directional signs were quite clear is not satisfying. Rereading may be the better part of value.  ‘Stella Maris’ the coda to ‘The Passenger’ is yet to be read but for now ‘non placet’.

(put Tenth Man in the search box of the blog to find further ruminations on that parable)