The Passage

The Passage
by Justin Cronin
Published June, 2010

As a reader, one of my absolute favourite things is a "genre" book so spectacularly written that it elevates the whole thing beyond its genre to something truly unique.
Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series is like this (Case Histories; One Good Turn; When Will There Be Good News and Started Early, Took My Dog); detective novels so beautifully written and peopled with such believable characters and such richly detailed settings that they feel utterly real.
Neil Gaiman does this too, writing fantasy novels that are somehow so much more than that; they're more like these layered, subtle meditations on love and time and mortality (even his children's books are like this, The Graveyard Book left me a sobbing, heartbroken mess).
The magnificent Jasper Fforde plays with genres like nobody's business - his award-winning The Big Over-Easy is a dark, noir-style crime novel that just happens to be peopled by a cast of Nursery Rhyme characters. In a crime novel. For adults. It shouldn't really work but it does. Really, really well.

Ok, so this is completely unrelated to The Passage but honestly, SUCH A GOOD BOOK

The Passage is like this too. Ostensibly, it's a kind of blockbuster (film rights having been sold before the book was even released) sci fi/horror novel with vampires. All of which sounds interesting enough that I eventually got around to reading The Passage a good six years after it was published, with relatively low expectations and hopes of a lightweight-but-fun romp of sci fi silliness. Instead, The Passage completely blew my mind.

The story begins neither with soulless blood-suckers nor sparkly emo teenagers, but instead with the genuinely affecting story of young mum Jeannette and her much-loved daughter, Amy Harper (named for Harper Lee) Bellafonte. Mistreated by men and unlucky in life, Jeannette's life eventually implodes in such a way that Amy is abandoned at a convent, where she meets the wonderful Sister Lacey Kudoto. Lacey is originally from Sierra Leone, where she experienced childhood brutalities that she has now supressed to the point that she doesn't actually remember any more.

There aren't many vampire novels that also educate you on world history.

Meanwhile, Special Agent Brad Wolgast meets with a series of Death Row inmates, recruiting for a top-secret government project whereby death sentences are waived in return for participation in a very unpleasant medical experiment. Recently divorced, Wolgast is tormented by memories of the young daughter he lost to a heart condition. One of the inmates recruited by Wolgast is formerly-homeless Anthony Carter. Convicted of (but probably not guilty of) the murder of a woman he loved beyond all reason, Carter has clear learning disabilities and a heart of gold.

It's these richly developed characters that really set The Passage apart in the early chapters. Everyone has a back story. A detailed, complex back story that helps to explain their actions and means that their stories really ring true. It's unusual to find a vampire novel that actually makes you cry because you feel bad for a convicted murderer. I am willing to admit, hand on heart, Jeanette Bellafonte's, Lacey Kudoto's, Brad Wolgast's and Anthony Carter's stories all made me cry before I was even 10% of the way through this book. I was an absolute blubbering mess. It was completely ridiculous.

Eventually, we get to the Horror part of the book as government experiments (and when do those ever turn out well?) go horribly wrong, releasing a plague of many-toothed, lightning-fast, ultra violent and practically immortal predators onto an unsuspecting world. Obviously, this is not a new idea so it's hard to explain exactly why it's so incredibly captivating - Justin Cronin is an absolute master of building suspense and before you know it, it's 4am and you still haven't gone to sleep because you MUST FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

This is a very good question. And also the reason that you may never sleep again. 

At 766 pages, The Passage is clearly a very long book, but it doesn't really feel that way. The book is quite definitively split, with the second half taking place in a notably different time and place than the first half, with a group of entirely new characters. With a large cast of these wonderfully well-developed characters (along with millions of soulless immortal monsters) and an apparently endless series of horrifying events, The Passage managed to keep my attention throughout, for every single one of those 766 pages. In fact, I was so caught up in the whole  thing that I immediately went out and bought the next two books the same day... That's right, there's not just 766 pages; there's three whole books' worth of this fantastic story.

Three whole books! Thousands of pages of this stuff!

The Passage is a beautifully written epic of post-apocalyptic America (not dissimilar in a lot of ways to Cormac McCarthy's wonderful novel The Road), complete with detailed imaginings of the breakdown of society under an overwhelming threat to humanity. It's an absolutely engrossing read, an extremely well-written, perfectly-paced sci fi novel, but also a novel about human life and relationships, full of colour, action, complicated morality and even the odd bit of well-placed humour.
It's not a perfect book - the central character of Amy feels sadly underdeveloped as we don't often get to know what she's thinking; the characters in the second half of the book don't quite have that same depth and distinctiveness as those in the first half (there was much less sobbing on my part in the second half); some characters have this incredibly annoying habit of saying "Flyers!" when they really mean "Fuck!". If you're going to make up swear words, they should really be good ones. Like, "cockwomble" perhaps? These are all pretty minor complaints though - taken as a whole, this book is very, very good.

If you have not already done so (and I'm kind of assuming you have, since I am way behind the times on this one), read this book immediately. But maybe on a weekend, I really wouldn't recommend that whole reading-til-4am-on-a-weeknight thing in retrospect.

Faithful

Faithful
by Alice Hoffman
Published November, 2016

The more I read, the less sure I am about what I actually like in a book. Faithful is the kind of book I would never have picked out for myself. Not in a million years. If I'd actually bothered to read the blurb properly beforehand, I would have given this a miss and I would've missed out on an absolute stunner of a novel.

Faithful is the story of Shelby Richmond, survivor of a car accident that destroyed her best friend Helene's life. Wracked with guilt, Shelby goes off the rails a bit and Faithful follows her over the following years as she moves to New York City and tries to get her life back together. To me, this does not sound like the premise for an interesting book. To me, this sounds trite, self-indulgent, sappy and uninspiring. Faithful is none of these things.

In Shelby, Alice Hoffman has created a truly memorable character. Somehow she's spiky and tough, but vulnerable and damaged at the same time. She makes terrible decisions, she pushes people away and she sabotages herself, but you just can't help but like her anyway. I've read very few books where I felt so strongly for a character that I just wanted everything to turn out well for them, even when they were making things difficult for themselves (not dissimilar to the fantastic character of Jude in Hanya Yanagahari's A Little Life). In essence, Faithful is Shelby's story and the reason it works so well is that Shelby is so very well written and completely believable.

Clearly, this Alice Hoffman is a very smart lady.

The relationships in Faithful are complex, nuanced and honest. There is a small but beautifully-written cast of supporting characters made  up of Shelby's friends and family, with every one of them feeling like a real person. Shelby's relationship with her mother is particularly affecting; sweet, sincere and heart-breaking at times. There's also these layers of complexity between characters - the story centres around Shelby, but the supporting characters all have these very believable relationships with each other outside of their relationships with Shelby. There are Shelby's parents, with their complicated, rocky marriage. Shelby's friend Maravelle has plenty of her own issues in raising her three children. Even Shelby's dogs have their own things going on. All in all, it creates this very credible group of people (and dogs) who just feel real.

Faithful is a story of trauma and healing and forgiveness, but never in a Hallmark-movie-of-the-week way. There's no easy fix where Shelby decides to just look on the bright side, and life goes back to how it was before the accident. Instead, Faithful tells a much more honest story about the ways in which we are affected for years afterwards by traumatic events; the strange, destructive and ridiculous ways in which we try to cope; and ultimately the importance of relationships in providing a foundation to rebuild a life. It's an absolutely beautiful story that will stay with you long after you've finished reading.