Scan barcode
A review by brassaf
The Passage by Justin Cronin
5.0
It is likely too early to write this review. This book is going to gnaw at me for the next many moons and I should probably wait to write a review until my brain buzz calms down. But I'm pressing on regardless. We never know what tomorrow will bring. We never know what today will bring! What if I am attacked by virals on my way home? You'd never get to read what I thought of this book! However, what if I did know what tomorrow will bring? What if I knew parts of the future? Not the whole puzzle that is the future. Maybe a few corner or edge pieces. Or maybe a big glob of connected pieces in one section of the puzzle. What if each of us held a section of connected pieces, but until we joined our piece clumps, we'd never know the whole puzzle? And what if the way to finish the puzzle meant waiting 100 years?
Thankfully it took me less time to read this book. It was very hard to put down. One day I sat in my office's lobby to get to the end of the chapter I'd been reading on the train. Another day I escaped at lunch to read some more of it outside on a bench while I munched my sandwich. It was a ham sandwich with some lettuce and mayonnaise. A bag of pretzels and an apple to chase it down. I was drinking water out of an emptied plastic bottle that originally held orange juice (which I had also drank). Someday someone may find this review and find it a valuable record of life in the year 2014.
Elements of the above two paragraphs are found in Justin Cronin's The Passage. What are they? I'm not telling you. He cleverly mixes the action of the present with excerpts from journals written by various characters, and read many (MANY) years in the future by a conference convened to study the fall of civilization as depicted in the book. Characters who seem insignificant, aren't. Characters whose survival seem central to the story, don't survive. (Or do they?) Mysteries build, some are cracked, and others open up. I expected the book to end or at least progress differently than it did. Cronin takes an end-of-civilization story and makes it about the people. Not just a corner of civilization and how they deal with it, although I thought that, at first. But about the people whose decisions are the crux of the survival of the human race. These characters don't know it. The reader doesn't know it. But that's how it happens.
Do yourself a favor, pick up this book. I will forgive you for putting it back down--but you won't be able to do it easily. Your journey, your passage through time spent reading this book, is reward in and of itself for the effort spent.
Thankfully it took me less time to read this book. It was very hard to put down. One day I sat in my office's lobby to get to the end of the chapter I'd been reading on the train. Another day I escaped at lunch to read some more of it outside on a bench while I munched my sandwich. It was a ham sandwich with some lettuce and mayonnaise. A bag of pretzels and an apple to chase it down. I was drinking water out of an emptied plastic bottle that originally held orange juice (which I had also drank). Someday someone may find this review and find it a valuable record of life in the year 2014.
Elements of the above two paragraphs are found in Justin Cronin's The Passage. What are they? I'm not telling you. He cleverly mixes the action of the present with excerpts from journals written by various characters, and read many (MANY) years in the future by a conference convened to study the fall of civilization as depicted in the book. Characters who seem insignificant, aren't. Characters whose survival seem central to the story, don't survive. (Or do they?) Mysteries build, some are cracked, and others open up. I expected the book to end or at least progress differently than it did. Cronin takes an end-of-civilization story and makes it about the people. Not just a corner of civilization and how they deal with it, although I thought that, at first. But about the people whose decisions are the crux of the survival of the human race. These characters don't know it. The reader doesn't know it. But that's how it happens.
Do yourself a favor, pick up this book. I will forgive you for putting it back down--but you won't be able to do it easily. Your journey, your passage through time spent reading this book, is reward in and of itself for the effort spent.