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Book Review: The Passage by Justin Cronin

By Pam Mc

 

Something is coming... Amy Harper Bellafonte is born as the result of a union between a 19-year-old waitress called Jeanette and a sweet talking married salesman called Bill Reynolds who was just passing through Iowa.

 

Four years later Bill returns, he’s unkempt, claims he has left his wife and Jeanette lets him move in despite her misgivings. The charming man she knew for a few days has gone; the new Bill has no job and a violent streak and when Jeanette asks him what he’s going to do for work he says he ‘has a plan’.

 

Eventually Jeanette throws Bill out with his final words ringing in her ears:

 

“You just wait to see what the world has in store for you, Jeanette. You remember I said that.”

The world does get worse for Jeanette, so bad that she turns to prostitution and ends up murdering a trick. On the run she goes to the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy and asks Sister Lacey to look after Amy, then disappears.

 

Meanwhile, Dr. Jonas Abbott Lear is in Bolivia searching for something that will extend life with the help of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and a group of Special Ops. On the way they are attacked by bats. As the remnants of the group go on he senses that someone is following them. Then he learns why the Special Ops team are really there.

 

Death Row Prisoner Anthony Lloyd Carter, accused of murdering mother of two Rachel Wood, is offered an opportunity that will take him off Death Row by Agent Wolgast and he accepts. Carter cannot clearly remember what happened to Rachel, he only remembers wanting to show his employer’s daughter a little baby toad ‘something that was a little as she was’.

 

Wolgast appears to be unfeeling and cold, but he has a painful past. When he questions the Army as to what the Death Row prisoners are being selected for he learns about Project NOAH, and finally understands why he was chosen to get them. Wolgast does his duty, until he’s asked to pick up a new test subject, a six-year-old girl called Amy who has been dumped at a convent...

 

“Before she became the Girl from Nowhere – the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years – she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”

 

It’s the detailed back stories of the characters that make this epic post-apocalyptic novel so readable. Nothing is as it seems, this becomes clearer the deeper you get into the book. Amy knows that ‘something is coming’ long before anyone else, she sense things before they happen. Amy’s uncanny abilities are worth bearing in mind as at this time she hasn’t been anywhere near Project NOAH, yet she appears to be capable of manipulating minds in a similar way to Project Zero, one of their ‘virals’, a terrifying vampire like creature.

 

When the virals escape their facility to rip into (one gory description describes tearing a human in half) or ‘take up’ (bite, drink and infect) the human population outside, the known world comes to an end and the book moves forward 100 years.

 

In 92 A.V. (after virus) the book introduces the reader to the First Colony and the Document of One Law that the remaining human population here live by. Capital letters are used to highlight that it’s a different time in the world. Walkers are welcomed and light sensitive Virals are kept out by high walls where a team of Watchers are on guard as lights blaze throughout the night. Littles, children under eight, are taken to the Sanctuary when they are born and shielded from the real world. The Colony even has its own language. Everyone has a role within the community and the worst form of punishment is to be subjected to the penalty of PUTTING WITHOUT THE WALLS.

 

This section featuring the First Colony is slower at first, reflecting the slower pace of life. The long days are enlivened by occasional pods of Viral attacks at night that are full of action and gut wrenching bravery. As time goes on the reader learns about the Colony’s daily routines, relationships, gossip, their fears and hopes and inevitably begins to care about the people living there.

 

When Amy arrives at the First Colony as a Walker, they instinctively know that she is different from them. Some people accept her, others don’t, and the worst and best aspects of human nature are explored. When those who do accept Amy find a nuclear fuelled microchip in her neck and decipher it, they realise that she may be the key to changing the world they live in for the better. Eight members of the Colony decide to take Amy on a Long Ride to return her to the source of the virus that created the virals. As the tensions in the Colony rise the pace of the novel cranks up into a series of high octane action sequences from that moment on that will set your heart racing.

 

The Passage is a journey, a 766 page rite of passage that will test the main characters’ friendships, love, loyalty and ultimately faith in each other and something greater than themselves. It’s a book that offers an insight into human nature and what it means to be human. At what point do we stop being human? Is it when fear of the unknown overwhelms us as it does some of the characters in the book? Amy has lived for over 90 years, yet she only looks fourteen and has an otherworldly presence, is she less than human or more so as a result of what has happened to her? Is a viral less than human? After all they are victims of a failed Army experiment. You may even feel empathy for the virals who are haunted by one question ‘who am I?’ There’s a particularly poignant scene where Peter, one of Amy’s escorts from the Colony, grabs a copper based pan in readiness of an attack from a viral:

 

“Peter became aware of a new sound, coming from the viral – a mournful nasal moaning, like the wine of a dog. As if the image of her face, reflected in the pan’s copper bottom, were the source of some deep and melancholy recognition.”

 

Flyers, this book will keep you hooked until the end and then it will leave you with plenty of unanswered questions (although there are clues to the potential answers scattered throughout if you pay attention) ready for book two in this trilogy, due out in 2012.

 

Author Justin Cronin is a professor of English at Rice University whose book of stories Mary and O’Neil won the Pen/Hemingway Award.

 

The film rights for The Passage have been picked up by Fox 2000 and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions

 

Published by Orion Books

www.orionbooks.co.uk

 

IBSN 978-0-7528-9784-4

Priced £20.00