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A review by emtees
The Passage by Justin Cronin
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This book is just a lot of book. I loved it, but it didn’t feel like the experience of reading a book so much as a seemingly endless journey through a story that kept changing focus, always staying engaging, but getting further and further from where it started, so that by the time the plot looped around back to the beginning it felt like it had been nearly as long for me as for the characters since those original events played out. And considering the book features a time jump of nearly a full century, that’s saying something.
The first section of the book takes place in a near future - though a near future written from the perspective of about 2010 that now feels a bit dated (Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 style terrorism are cultural obsessions). Even in these early chapters, the world is already sliding towards dystopia - New Orleans has been destroyed by floods and the country is covered in checkpoints that make any kind of anonymous travel impossible. In this version of a dark US, Brad Wolgast, an FBI agent on the verge of retirement, and his partner travel from one prison to another, recruiting men sentenced to death row into a secret government project that is using a virus discovered in the jungles of South America to attempt to cure… death, basically, or at least aging. The build up of this first section is really well done - there’s Brad’s story, which includes his personal tragedies, only slowly spooled out; a series of emails from a scientist detailing the dramatic situation under which the virus was discovered; and the story of Amy, a young girl from a mundanely sad background who, due to a series of coincidences (maybe? The role of coincidence in this story isn’t always clear and there always appears to be a hint that some sort of destiny in in play) is selected to become the latest victim of the project. Cronin sells the cynicism and conflicting goals of the various scientific, military and intelligence figures behind Project Noah so well that you actually believe such an obviously dumb project could go forward, and that the fall out from it that destroys civilization as we know it is inevitable. When the collapse comes, Wolgast ends up on the run with Amy, hiding out as the dystopia around them reaches them only in rumors.
And then the story jumps forward a hundred years and we meet the real hero, Peter, a young man living in an isolated community of human survivors who is sure that his life is meant to contain more than it does. Peter gets the opportunity to prove that when a mysterious girl arrives in his community, mute and yet able to communicate, bearing a military chip that seems to be sending a signal to a distant location. A girl named Amy.
The story here is so massive, with tons of side characters and their internal and external journeys, that it got hard to keep track of it all at times, but Cronin masterfully ties it all together in the end. In the beginning I was often unsure what I was supposed to focus on - did the time jump mean that all the characters from the first section were just gone and I didn’t need to remember anything about them? Does it matter that we know one of the death row inmates who participated in the project wasn’t actually guilty of anything but kindness to a lonely woman? What about the backstory of Lacey, a nun who tries to help Amy, or the journal entries of a young girl who survived the initial chaos of the apocalypse? The answer is yes, Cronin makes it all matter (well, maybe not the death row inmate, but I expect that to come into play in later books.) I don’t just mean that he ties the plot up neatly, little hints you could almost miss fitting together at just the right moment, although he does do that in brilliant form, but that the emotional struggles of the characters, their relationships with each other and their experiences of despair and faith, all matter. Themes reoccur in a way that feels literary, whether that’s the importance of remembering our stories, hinted at through the sections told in journal form that are being read a thousand years in the future, or even the changed meaning of Project Noah, from a reference to the long life of the biblical figure to a hint at the way humanity will survive. For all that this is an adventure story, an apocalyptic journey, a horror novel, it is also a deeply emotional and soulful book about survival. I cannot wait to pick up the next one.
The first section of the book takes place in a near future - though a near future written from the perspective of about 2010 that now feels a bit dated (Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 style terrorism are cultural obsessions). Even in these early chapters, the world is already sliding towards dystopia - New Orleans has been destroyed by floods and the country is covered in checkpoints that make any kind of anonymous travel impossible. In this version of a dark US, Brad Wolgast, an FBI agent on the verge of retirement, and his partner travel from one prison to another, recruiting men sentenced to death row into a secret government project that is using a virus discovered in the jungles of South America to attempt to cure… death, basically, or at least aging. The build up of this first section is really well done - there’s Brad’s story, which includes his personal tragedies, only slowly spooled out; a series of emails from a scientist detailing the dramatic situation under which the virus was discovered; and the story of Amy, a young girl from a mundanely sad background who, due to a series of coincidences (maybe? The role of coincidence in this story isn’t always clear and there always appears to be a hint that some sort of destiny in in play) is selected to become the latest victim of the project. Cronin sells the cynicism and conflicting goals of the various scientific, military and intelligence figures behind Project Noah so well that you actually believe such an obviously dumb project could go forward, and that the fall out from it that destroys civilization as we know it is inevitable. When the collapse comes, Wolgast ends up on the run with Amy, hiding out as the dystopia around them reaches them only in rumors.
And then the story jumps forward a hundred years and we meet the real hero, Peter, a young man living in an isolated community of human survivors who is sure that his life is meant to contain more than it does. Peter gets the opportunity to prove that when a mysterious girl arrives in his community, mute and yet able to communicate, bearing a military chip that seems to be sending a signal to a distant location. A girl named Amy.
The story here is so massive, with tons of side characters and their internal and external journeys, that it got hard to keep track of it all at times, but Cronin masterfully ties it all together in the end. In the beginning I was often unsure what I was supposed to focus on - did the time jump mean that all the characters from the first section were just gone and I didn’t need to remember anything about them? Does it matter that we know one of the death row inmates who participated in the project wasn’t actually guilty of anything but kindness to a lonely woman? What about the backstory of Lacey, a nun who tries to help Amy, or the journal entries of a young girl who survived the initial chaos of the apocalypse? The answer is yes, Cronin makes it all matter (well, maybe not the death row inmate, but I expect that to come into play in later books.) I don’t just mean that he ties the plot up neatly, little hints you could almost miss fitting together at just the right moment, although he does do that in brilliant form, but that the emotional struggles of the characters, their relationships with each other and their experiences of despair and faith, all matter. Themes reoccur in a way that feels literary, whether that’s the importance of remembering our stories, hinted at through the sections told in journal form that are being read a thousand years in the future, or even the changed meaning of Project Noah, from a reference to the long life of the biblical figure to a hint at the way humanity will survive. For all that this is an adventure story, an apocalyptic journey, a horror novel, it is also a deeply emotional and soulful book about survival. I cannot wait to pick up the next one.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Body horror and Death
Moderate: Pregnancy
Minor: Suicide
Lots of body horror and death by vampires. A main character is pregnant through the book and has a difficult, though successful, child birth scene near the end. There is a brief mention of suicide.