By Ed Park, Special to the Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
June 15, 2010
Author Justin Cronin. (Caleb Jones / Associated Press)
Chosen for both the Pulitzer Prize and coverage on "Oprah," Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel "The Road" regularly appears in debates over genre carpetbagging. Should die-hard fans of a genre (in this case science fiction) be honored or annoyed when an interloper wanders onto their creative territory? The title of McCarthy's book indicates the path its father-and-son protagonists follow, but it might also symbolize the author's journey from revered offshoot of the Melville-Hemingway-Faulkner axis to de facto practitioner of end-of-the-world lit. Justin Cronin's ample vampire-virus saga "The Passage" also presents a vivid eschatology, while its title indicates an even more profound transformation of one sort of literary sensibility into another. Whether the transformation takes is one of the tantalizing aspects of "The Passage."
Cronin's pre-"Passage" career isn't as well-known as McCarthy's pre-"Road" oeuvre was, though his debut, "Mary and O'Neil," won the 2002 PEN/Hemingway Prize. That ingeniously elliptical novel-in-stories is the epitome of the quiet literary work, populated with well-meaning characters whose lives hinge on grief and love. The book leapfrogs through time, each narrative at once discrete and integral to the larger picture. The cumulative effect, on the final page, is an overwhelming surge of emotion.
"The Passage" also has a memorable ending (more on that later), but otherwise would seem to share little with "Mary and O'Neil," which could fit inside its pages several times over. Lethal bats attack, crossbows get unloaded, rogue operatives blow up small-town civilians and death-row inmates are recruited as guinea pigs for a top-secret medical experiment. The vampires (called, variously, virals, jumps, smokes and dracs) that eventually run rampant are not the suave stuff of Bram Stoker but brutal, hideously efficient killing machines. Desire, not to mention irony, has been removed from the monster's equation. This is the straight stuff, for better or worse.
Most audaciously, Cronin allows a century to pass invisibly between the action of the opening third of the book and the start of the remainder: America has been decimated by dracs, and Cronin conjures up a new one out of its ashes — a "colony" of human survivors in California, circa 92 AV (After Virus), that relies on huge lights to fend off the photophobic creatures.
As committed as Cronin is to this brave new world of mortal combat and stunted technology, he's even more concerned with making his characters recognizably human. The first 250 pages are nearly flawless. Set slightly in the future, it weaves an intricate but always compelling story centering on a girl named Amy, whose hard-luck mother abandons her to an African-born nun named Lacey; and Wolgast, the FBI agent assigned to retrieve her for Project NOAH, a mysterious, military-bankrolled experiment in longevity that will soon run amok. Wolgast finds in Amy the daughter he lost. Here Cronin also gives us deep-background miniatures of minor characters, and though the prose is occasionally overwrought, it's never boring.
Honing in on vampires' traditional immortality, "The Passage" initially has the lineaments of a morality tale. The middle third begins with a dizzying series of enticing documents, found material that lends a human touch to the far-future setting. But soon enough, "The Passage" slips into a less-exacting version of the voice used earlier, and the narration often feels portentous and slack. And, although the effect of omnipresent fear can be enhanced by keeping the Other as a murky object of anxiety, it can also defang the creature in question. I could have used less claustrophobia and more reminders like this:
"Peter had gotten used to the virals' appearance but still found it unnerving to see one close up. The way the facial features seemed to have been buffed away, smoothed into an almost infantile blandness; the curling expansion of the hands and feet, with their grasping digits and razor-sharp claws; the dense muscularity of the limbs and torso and the long, gimballed neck; the slivered teeth crowding the mouth like spikes of steel."
Things pick up, largely due to some show-stopping action sequences. Amy comes to the California outpost — nine decades older, yet frozen as a preteen — and the last third takes the form of a quest, as a band of colonists sets out to solve the mystery of the girl's origins. One major drawback, strangely, is Amy herself. Nearly mute and observed almost entirely from the outside at this point, she comes off at best as a sort of heroic enigma. The reader roots for her, certainly, and grasps why the colonists are so curious about her strange abilities. But if Cronin has made us privy to so many other points of view, why can't we experience hers?
Some readers will feel compelled to follow the story — there are plotlines to burn — through the next two volumes of Cronin's trilogy. Others, like myself, will be content with "The Passage" alone, letting Amy and the colonists come to rest in this book's uneasy limbo.
Park is the author of "Personal Days: a Novel" and writes the Astral Weeks column, which appears at latimes.com/books.
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times
Justin Cronin's vampire saga, 'The Passage,' reviewed by Ron Charles
By Ron Charles
The Washington Post
Wednesday, June 9, 2010; C04
http://www.washingtonpost.com
THE PASSAGE
By Justin Cronin
Ballantine. 766 pp. $27
Sorry, Bella. No sparkly underwear models flex their way through Justin Cronin's massive new vampire thriller. But just about everything else has been sucked into the great maw of "The Passage," this summer's most wildly hyped novel.
Cronin is the latest indication that no one, not even an English professor at Rice University who's written a couple of small literary novels, is safe from the count's bloody fangs. You'd think Cronin's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop would repel vampires like a garlic necklace, but who can resist Dracula's mesmeric gaze, not to mention that $3.75 million advance? (Rumors of Marilynne Robinson's upcoming werewolf novel could not be confirmed at press time.)
Of course, you're skeptical. So was I. But by the third chapter, trash was piling up in our house because I was too scared to take out the garbage at night. It's a macabre pleasure to see what a really talented novelist can do with these old Transylvanian tropes. In the same way that "Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell" gave us a mature alternative to "Harry Potter," "The Passage" is for adults who've been bitten but can't swallow the teenybopper misogyny of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series.
As a writer, though, Cronin is more Dr. Frankenstein than Dr. Van Helsing. "The Passage," the first volume of a planned trilogy, doesn't have any interest in pursuing ol' Count Dracula; it's all about stitching together the still-beating scraps of classic horror and science fiction, techno thrillers and apocalyptic terror. Although a clairvoyant nun plays a crucial role, Cronin has stripped away the lurid religious trappings of the vampire myth and gone with a contemporary biomedical framework. Imagine Michael Crichton crossbreeding Stephen King's "The Stand" and "Salem's Lot" in that lab at Jurassic Park, with rich infusions of Robert McCammon's "Swan Song," "Battlestar Galactica" and even Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
A pastiche? Please -- Cronin is trading derivatives so fast and furious he should be regulated by the SEC. But who cares? It's alive!
The story opens a few years in the future, when the war on terror has come home with frequent attacks on American shopping malls and subway stations. A secret government project wants to create a new breed of soldiers by reengineering a virus found in some nasty Bolivian bats. The last 12 test subjects are death row inmates -- murderers and rapists -- just the kind of people you'd want to endow with lightning speed, impenetrable exoskeletons and a rapacious thirst for human blood.
But relax, what could possibly go wrong? These are government experts. They've got, like, double locks on the cages and everything. (I walk home a little faster now past the NIH biohazard lab in Bethesda.) As you might expect, "mistakes were made." Soon the entire country is overrun by indestructible, blood-sucking fiends -- like a presidential campaign that never ends.
The second part of the book picks up about 90 years later with an abrupt jump in locale and tone. From here on out, we follow the fate of a small community of descendants hanging on in a walled compound powered by antique technology. It's an engrossing if vampiric version of Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us": Nuclear plants melt down and explode, vegetation retakes the cities, and the Gulf of Mexico fills with oil from untended wells (like that could ever happen).
Cronin proves himself just as skillful with the dystopic future as he is with the techno-thriller that opens "The Passage." This second section sinks deep into the exotic customs of these beleaguered survivors. We meet a vibrant cast of citizen warriors, who have to ask themselves each day if it's worth fighting against the dying of the light. (If those wind-powered bulbs go out, the "virals" will swoop in.)
Their best fighter is a stoic bombshell named Alicia, who was raised by an old soldier to kill -- and could teach Lara Croft a few things about being hot and deadly. I was initially less impressed with Peter, the earnest young man who gradually becomes the center of this epic. He's about as sexy as a Sears shirt model, but there's something endearing about his modesty and determination, and eventually I saw the wisdom of placing this good-hearted everyman at the center of all these bizarre crises.
Fortunately, Cronin has a wry sense of humor that runs from macabre to silly. A passing reference to Jenna Bush as governor of Texas may be the scariest thing in these pages. Soldiers watching an old reel of Béla Lugosi's "Dracula" in a post-apocalyptic vampire wasteland is a particularly nice touch. And in the final pages of the novel, one of my favorite characters "lapsed into a kind of twilight," but not Stephenie Meyer's kind.
Yes, once in a while, Cronin can't resist sucking on a few supple cliches. A traumatized survivor obviously heading toward something terrible says, "I wonder if we are heading toward something terrible." There's a prostitute with a heart of gold, a little child holds the key to humanity's salvation, and some exhilarating chapters have needless cliffhangers grafted on to the last line, e.g., "Something was about to happen." Duh.
But once vampires start leaping from the treetops, you're not going to notice those little flaws. You'll be running too fast. Part of what makes these light-sensitive monsters so terrifying is that Cronin never lets us see them much or for long. For hundreds of pages, we remain like the harried survivors of this ravaged nation, peering into the darkness for those telltale orange eyes, the last thing we'll see before we experience the new sensation of being ripped from crotch to neck. It'll be interesting to see if Ridley Scott, having reportedly paid $1.75 million for the movie rights, can exercise such restraint. But even if he can't, late in the novel there's a climactic gladiator scene with Wild West overtones that will blow the top of your head off.
About halfway through the chewy center of "The Passage," I was whining that Cronin should have cut out a few hundred pages, but by the end, the only thing I wanted was to get my sweaty hands on the next two volumes. Till then, I'll be keeping the lights on.
Charles is The Washington Post's fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/roncharles.
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