REVIEWS
McCarthy duo offer insight but fall short on plot
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, published in 2006, might’ve been a fitting final novel – universally praised, winning the Pulitzer, a lauded movie adaptation. But McCarthy has never been one to confirm people’s expectations so now, 16 years later at the age of 89, he’s published two interconnected novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
is the more conventional of the pair, with acting as an oblique coda. has the superficial trappings of a thriller in the. The strapline on the cover reads: “A sunken jet. Nine passengers. A missing body.” But this is a piece of not-so-subtle misdirection, and anyone looking for the propulsive narrative of some of McCarthy’s other work will be disappointed.