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.