Along with a stash of gold coins, which ensure that their material needs are taken care of, the Western siblings inherit from their parents a moral stain that cannot be washed away, combined with the kind of psychological irregularities that sometimes coincide with genius. Their surname positions them (unsubtly) as postwar Westerners who live in the aftermath of irredeemable wartime atrocities: ‘Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the sister events that sealed forever the fate of the West.’ The Passenger and Stella Maris, firmly anchored in the second half of the twentieth century, foreground the existential anxieties of a culture horrified by its creations and anticipating nuclear war.

The prose is companionable but uninspired during the dialogue-heavy first half of The Passenger; then it shifts into a heightened poetic register. This coincides with a tonal shift from wry melancholy to solemn tragedy. Even The Kid is ennobled by the end, when Bobby catches a last glimpse of him in a dream:

God’s own mudlark trudging cloaked and muttering the barren selvage of some nameless desolation where the cold sidereal sea breaks and seethes and the storms howl in from out of that black and heaving alcahest. Trudging the shingles of the universe, his thin shoulders turned to the stellar winds and the suck of alien moons dark as stones. A lonely shoreloper hurrying against the night, small and friendless and brave.

Stella Maris is ‘a non-denominational facility and hospice for the care of psychiatric and medical patients’ where Alicia voluntarily stays among the ‘looneys’. She commits herself in order to take advantage of ‘the latitude extended to the deranged’. The name of the facility refers to a ‘female protector’ or ‘guiding spirit’, and in this context it positions Alicia as a Beatrice-like figure who commands the devotion of everyone who knows her, even in death.

Stella Maris takes the form of a series of recorded interviews between Alicia and a Doctor Cohen, during her final stay at the facility, as Bobby lies unresponsive after his car crash. As with McCarthy’s ‘dramatic novel’ The Sunset Limited (2006), it is a dialogue between an unusually intelligent but resolutely suicidal person and an interlocutor who seeks to understand their anguish and prevent or delay their death. The similarities between the two works are striking, but Stella Maris is more expansive in its concerns
than The Sunset Limited and we are more invested in Alicia’s fate.

McCarthy’s ability to make complex philosophical reflection serve narrative functions is undiminished. Characters in The Passenger and Stella Maris dwell on problems like ‘the indeterminacy of reality itself’ and the distorting effects of perception: ‘There were no starry skies prior to the first sentient and ocular being to behold them. Before that all was blackness and silence.’ They also give voice to a profound pessimism. From The Passenger: ‘A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.’ When asked, in Stella Maris, to ‘say something definitive about the world in a single sentence’, Alicia replies: ‘The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.’ She believes there is ‘an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world’, that ‘at the core of reality lies a deep and eternal demonium’. None of this will surprise McCarthy devotees.

In Cities of the Plain (1998), a blind man cautions John Grady Cole against his passion for an epileptic Mexican teenage prostitute who ‘belongs’ to a dangerous pimp: ‘Your love has no friends. You think that it does but it does not. None. Perhaps not even God.’ The love that Alicia and Bobby have for each other is also friendless. We learn that Bobby fell for his sister as he watched her play the role of Medea:

She was dressed in a gown she’d made from sheeting and she wore a crown of woodbine in her hair. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rags and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals. She was thirteen. He was in his second year of graduate school at Caltech and watching her that summer evening he knew that he was lost. His heart in his throat. His life no longer his.

Alicia tells a similar tale. Their shared sexual desires are unfulfilled due to Bobby’s fearful resistance. He has nightmares of demonic sex in a ‘dusky penetralium’ littered with stillborn infants. For her part, Alicia is restrained only by her belief that Bobby cannot refuse her forever, that his love will overwhelm his fears and they will inevitably run away together and have the child she dreams about. McCarthy’s readers will think back to the incest-begotten infant of Outer Dark (1968) and the grim story that follows its birth.

I doubt that McCarthy set himself the challenge of romanticising incestuous desire and suicide, but he succeeds in complicating our reactions to them. Knowing her family history, we agree when Alicia says ‘There are worse things in the world’ than her desire for her brother. The Western siblings are star-crossed lovers in the fullest sense. The idea that they can switch off their feelings and live normal lives is given no credence, and Alicia is so intent on suicide that it seems fated.

McCarthy’s later fictions are populated with ardent but forlorn characters who endure grave trials and terrible losses yet retain a spark of honour or decency, and these two novels conform to that pattern. The protagonists are sympathetic despite their shortcomings; if they appear perverse in various ways, we are prepared to forgive them because they suffer so profoundly and remain faithful to their fatal flaws. The novels centre on uncomfortable themes, but, aside from descriptions of wartime experiences and the aftermath of nuclear explosions, there is little in the way of grotesquery and brutality when compared with McCarthy’s earlier novels. The forces of devastation are not embodied by characters who represent an outsized demonic malevolence, like Judge Holden in Blood Meridian (1985) or Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2005). Instead, unfulfilled yearning, destruction, and grief are figured as the fundamental conditions of life.

McCarthy conceived and began drafting The Passenger in late 1980. Four decades is a long gestation, and readers who expect fiction as stylistically bold and rhetorically masterful as Suttree (1979) or Blood Meridian, after such a wait, will be disappointed. These new novels are more affecting than formally impressive, more mournfully humane than provocative, but they unsettle and seduce in equal measure, casting a sorrowful spell that lingers.