The Passage

Only I would take a "break" from Moby Dick to read a 750 page monstrosity for my own amusement. I'm happy I did, though. The weird thing is how and why this book caught my attention in the first place. Well, not entirely weird, since Momo basically just sent me the NY Times article on its release. What I mean is that the focus of the NY Times article was on how this entire book's publication and fast sale of the movie rights (both happening I think before the book was even finished), was because it was supposedly a vampire story. And I guess it is, in some vague sense. Definitely more Bram Stoker lore than Twilight, that's for sure, but the fact that the infected resemble vampires isn't really a focal point of the story. Going into it the only things I knew about the story were in that article. I really didn't know what I had signed up for at all. I just picked it up and started. Lucky for me, the only kind of book I like better than a cheesy vampire romance is an apocalyptic outbreak drama, which is exactly what this is. (How great is that wiki article for those of us predisposed to checking our way through reading lists?) In my list of all time favorite books that I have read over and over again, The Stand, World War Z, and The Andromeda Strain rank high. There have seriously been times where I have finished one of those books and had the desire to just flip back to page 1 and start all over again (and sometimes I have done just that). Also, I will watch any awful tv-miniseries version of those books, even if they do "star" Benjamin Bratt. I don't know that anything could be said to star that stilted-acting-generically-attractive man. (I'm not sure I even knew I had a thing against him until now. I think it's the fact that an episode of Law & Order with him in it means I am being denied Jesse L. Martin, and I really only like that series for the holy trinity of Orbach, Watson and Martin).

The Passage is a little too long to indulge myself in reading it that way, but it holds my fascination in the same way as those books do. Even when the premise seems laughable (a disease that creates murderous zombie rage or blood-sucking superhumans), the plausibility of the human reaction is what makes the story so great. I just got chills thinking about some of the common scenes that these books have. Nearly all of them have passing scenes in which the protagonists find a church, full to the brim of people getting their last minute worship on, or performing mass suicide to avoid the inevitable, or performing mercy killings of children to spare them the coming danger. That's the lesson, kiddies. It's always easier to die than survive, to pray rather than do something, anything.

But that's just Act 1, Scene 1. This book is like 5 books in one. And 5 styles in one. At times it would be more like World War Z or a Crichton novel. There were passages that were meant to be documents and data that were released as a historical or scientific inquiry. The author may claim he's never read Twilight, but I would be shocked to learn that he hadn't read Z or Andromeda. Possibly The Road, too, but someone who has read that one will have to fill me in. But there was this whole supernatural element that was much more Stephen King. I know I'm just listing off other stories and using those to describe this boo, but that is completely what it read like. It was like someone combined all of those books into one and maybe expanded into a little bit of Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, and there you go.

There are a few reasons that I bring up Xenocide, but I'll try to focus on the parts that for one, aren't spoilers, and for another, are things I can easily explain, since it seems like I am the only one in the world who has read that line of Card's Ender series. After the first part of the story, the disease-ravaging part, the story focuses on a community of survivors. Not only that, but it skips ahead 100 years to the descendants of those survivors and the community that they have built. In Xenocide, a series of events leads to the opening up of the star system, and groups of people choose a planet and start to build their own world there. Over time and generations, they become isolated from the rest of the galaxy. Space travel takes too long to make travel between the communities feasible, and although their means of communication is instantaneous, the happenings of the outside world become less important than the day to day drama of crops and interpersonal relationships. It's this disconnect from the outside world that is common to both stories. But what I enjoy is the author's mental exercise in socio-cultural origins in these situations. What lingo would we develop to refer to things? What words and concepts would we lose entirely because they were irrelevant to our existence now or the technology was gone? And how would that change us, as a people? What mistakes would we make again, when all the people who remembered the past were all gone? As I said, The Passage is a bunch of books in one, and it moves on from that examination and back into the stream of the battle between infected and survivors, but the glimpse into a world where children might as well be born on a different planet for all that it resembles our own upbringing is one of my favorite parts of this book.

I just re-read that article and realized that he has plans for a trilogy. That is a word that makes me shiver with anticipation my friends. Love it. Although it does make me re-evaluate the ending, since I thought that I was going to have to mentally and emotionally adjust to deal with the loose threads that he had left. I don't know that I would be disappointed if he decided not to finish it. There's something poignant about the ending, however unresolved, and there are mysteries that may be diminished by a resolution.

p.s. I just glanced at the Amazon reviews as I was adding links to this entry, and someone noted that this was definitely not Twilight; they won't be making "Team Babcock" shirts any time soon. Please someone else finish this book so that they can find that as hilarious as I just did. Now I'm tempted to do just that. What a conversation starter that would be.