Current Contributing Editor Christina Bieber Lake has reviewed Cormac McCarthy’s latest two novels for Comment. Bieber Lake describes McCarthy’s work as a whole as “Tales that make you ache for goodness and beauty… Tales written in prose that begs you to savour it as if it were your final meal.”
A taste from this review:
The Passenger and its companion novel, Stella Maris, are no exception and are worth the wait. But there is also something a bit different going on here. McCarthy, whose work lives inside cosmological questions, seems here to favour a particular kind of answer to the deep mysteries of our existence. Not a final answer, mind you. McCarthy has never been a nihilist, though he is often misread that way. But he seems to be, well, more certain about what could be called quantum-level uncertainty: the radical, foundational mystery that is quantum reality. These novels enact the so-called measurement problem—that the act of observing a quantum object somehow determines its existence and destiny. As the physics-trained protagonist Bobby Western puts it, “there is no information independent of the apparatus necessary to its perception.” Consciousness (and the unconscious) is central, not peripheral, to reality itself…
McCarthy’s fictional world has always been haunted by witness to—and fear of—loss. For him, to live in the Western world today is to live in the terror created by two possibilities that can never be proved: God awaits us on the other side of this life, or there is nothing there but silence. If there is silence, then our capacity to destroy ourselves and this earth must be our ultimate concern. As one character puts it in The Passenger, the “bomb is lying doggo for the present. But it wont stay that way.” Despite her protestations to the contrary, Alicia is so troubled by her father’s contribution to that capacity that “what she believed ultimately was that the very stones of the earth had been wronged.” The reference to Luke 16, with its revelation of a redeemer absent in McCarthy’s world, is clear: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”
And to quote from the conclusion to the review: …McCarthy presents us with something not so easily dismissed: a picture of the collective imagination of a Western world that is surely, steadily, and finally letting go of hope. When that happens, we will be left only with noisy, meaningless movement, the endless creation and re-creation of narratives, the fictions we choose to live by. Noise that is the hallmark of the perpetually distracted, the ones who close their eyes so as not to be reminded that we are passengers on a road—to nowhere.
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