By Al LaFleche
Justin Cronin’s The Passage has been promoted as the big book of the summer. Having heard or read some good things about it, I checked the dust jacket for a description. It sounded like a retelling of the now classic secret government test gone awry, and indeed it is. The government has discovered a vampire/zombie virus in the depths of the South American jungle and wants to exploit it to create super soldiers.
The main protagonist is one Amy Bellafonte, aka, Amy NLN (No Last Name), the Girl from Nowhere who is the product of a short affair between a diner waitress and a married man. Along the way, the waitress becomes a hooker and kills a john, then drops Amy off at a convent so she can avoid arrest and disappear from the story.
Enter Wolgast, an FBI agent specializing in transporting condemned prisoners to the government’s secret test facility, where they will be infected with the virus. Wolgast transports Carter, an African American with mild developmental disabilities who was convicted of killing the woman who had taken him under her do-gooder wing. Wolgast is suddenly tasked with bringing Amy to the facility as well.
Here are some of the initial problems with the narrative. When one of the nuns takes Amy to the Memphis zoo, her presence creates a virtual riot among the animals. Why? We are never told. When Wolgast picks her up, she is identified as Amy NLN, despite the government’s ability to track and find her almost instantaneously, even though her mother had been living off the grid.
Due to the loss of his own daughter, Wolfgast becomes attached to Amy and convinces his partner to try to run away with the girl. They realize they will not succeed and give themselves up to a local sheriff. Wolgast’s bosses come to pick them up and summarily execute all the townspeople who have seen the girl.
Amy is infected with the virus, but it doesn’t turn her into a blood-lusting, mind-controlling, super-human vampire mutant, as it does the others. The vamps break out and mayhem ensues. Wolgast and Amy escape, thanks to the sacrifice of several characters, and live a season or two in the mountain camp of Wolgast’s youth.
Jump ahead a century to the Colony, a fortified outpost in the high desert of California. The descendants of refugee children of the vampire holocaust live here and fight off the virals, as the creatures are known. The group’s members believe they are the last outpost of humans. The author details their lives in depth, as well as their oligarchic constitution.
Several hundred pages later, a radio signal is picked up and grows ever stronger. The signal comes from a chip in Amy’s neck. Remember Amy? This is a story about Amy. Anyway, she hasn’t aged in the last hundred years, though she has sort of forgotten how to speak.
Her arrival seems to increase the virals’ knack for mind control, and Amy, along with several colonists, breaks away to find the source of a code from the chip that was implanted in her a hundred years earlier. This has taken about 300 pages, and there are 400 more to go.
In fact, the book is some 766 pages in hard cover. At times, I felt it a struggle to continue on. To some degree, this was because I just couldn’t get attached to the characters. When they died, there was no sense of loss. And that’s okay, because the author brought several back from their “deaths,” some after extended narrative passages, some after only a chapter.
In Stephen King’s Misery, Annie Wilkes complains about authors cheating with the story line, by not having one action flow from another, or by having the story line lose its internal rationality and believability. Cronin does this repeatedly. There are the deaths that really aren’t deaths. There’s a stray dog that shows up from nowhere and is fully socialized to humans, despite the homestead having been abandoned for a hundred years. (And no, it’s not a magical/spiritual dog.) Its presence barely provides any forward motion to the story.
We are left with numerous unanswered questions. Why was Amy not affected by the virus, as were the others? Why was another character also minimally affected? What was is about the unaltered Amy that set the animals off? Why do people several generations removed from freeways use the common parlance of today in referring to an interstate as “The 15?” How could a chip simply be soldered to a motherboard and be readable?
Then there are the deus ex machina, including a completely unbelievable incident involving a hidden compartment on a locomotive.
Ultimately, the book seems to simply run out of steam and grinds to a halt with several plot lines in the air. This was the ultimate cheat. Several online reviews have stated this is to be the first book of a trilogy. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems that should have been mentioned somewhere on the dust jacket. Would I have bought this knowing I’d have to wait possibly two years for the resolution of the story? As it turns out, would I even care?
