I read The Passenger by Chris Petit over Easter. The book was loaned to me by my son who said, "If you understand the ending, make sure you explain it to me too."
I thought, "Ha! Leave it to me sonny" in that thought-only, gloating way mothers have when they suspect their kids are getting cleverer than they are and they smell a rare win coming up.
So, in a nutshell, The Passenger is a fabulous book. Fast-paced, clever, dark, complicated, harrowing, unputdownable.
Then you read the final chapter and you want to scream, "WHAT THE...?!" and throw it out the window.
So this is basically a begging letter to anyone reading this blog entry who has also read The Passenger and understands the bloody thing.
Has Collard dreamt everything? Is he working it out in those awful 46.5 seconds. IS HE TALKING TO US FROM THE BEYOND FOR GOD'S SAKE??
I've already googled the book and all I can find is a bunch of really pissed-off people who don't understand the ending.
As I don't. And it's driving me nuts. Please help if you can.
4 comments:
Well thanks for the warning. That'll be one book I won't read. Couldn't stand it if the ending was stupid and confusing. I like nice tidy endings where everyone lives happily ever after. Myself included.
Haha curse those books that make you want to throw out a window :P The Collector made me very angry at the end... but at least I understood all of it.
To wikipedia! OK apparently it's not important enough to have it's own article...
Nope too bad you're going to have to be messed with until you calm down and find something else to mess with your brain to the point of frustration (Enter J.J. Abrams!)
Yeah, lose all hope of having those rare wins over your children... you've had your time. Us computer savvy, illiterate internet people have taken over lol. (mwahahahaha all ur base are belong to us)
Hi Michelle, love the blog. Here is the author quoted in an interview on 3am. "The link between the books is that they are essentially posthumous, underlined by the fact that the old spy master in The Passenger is a ghost: spook as spook." Hope that helps
Thanks for that, Anon. I eventually figured out that Angleton, the old spy master, was a ghost (duh!) so I guess Collard must have been one too. What a cop out! The rest of the book was absolutely brilliant.
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