The Passage by Justin Cronin has a lot to teach about thriller writing. Clocking in at 766 pages, it meets the definition of "summer blockbuster" in every sense. It was hugely hyped, sold for a $3.75 million advance, bears a shiny cover, and promises to be the first in a trilogy. Most tellingly, it is about a society's self-destruction brought on by the military's invention of "virals," a bloodthirsty, long-living kind beast akin to vampires. In other words, Twilight meets The Road. How could I resist?And so, after haranguing Fawn into getting The Passage on her Kindle as well, I dove into the book. After the first two hundred pages or so, it became clear that The Passage is not just a typical thriller, and that it deserved the praise it has garnered from The AV Club and The New York Times.
The main difference between The Passage and every other thriller out there is that it is relatively well-written, and relatively well-plotted, emphasis on the relatively. Though Justin Cronin is known for his literary chops in such novels as The Summer Guest, he didn't use many elegant sentences in The Passage. But this actually makes it more readable, as the eyes don't linger too long on any one sentence. Instead, in true beach read fashion, The Passage allows you to skim the pages and know precisely what's going on. Just be sure to catch the cliffhanging/revelatory last sentence of each section to get the plot developments.
The plot developments are as follows: It's the near future. There's an orphan named Amy. There's also a military plot to make people who can heal really quickly/be fearless to use as potential secret weapons. But wait, something goes awry. Flash forward 100 years. There's a colony of survivors from the vampire outbreak. Most of North American civilization as we know it has ended. The colonists need to find an energy source to sustain their settlement. The girl named Amy comes back. What does she have to do with the vampires? Will the settlement survive? These are the questions.
Though easily summed up, the plot impressively spans many bio-medical and existential themes that make novel thought provoking at times. Most obviously, it asks about the ethics of human medical experimentation, and condemns the military-industrial complex for bringing the end of the world upon us. More profoundly, it asks about the significance of souls to the human experience. In the world overrun with vampires that Cronin has created, lost souls seem to pervade people's dreams, making them uneasy all the time. Cronin seems to suggest that a sense of self-identity, of soul, separates humans from the vampires.
At the same time, The Passage's many shortcomings reflect the inherent difficulties of thriller writing. First, it is massive. You wonder why it takes Cronin hundreds of pages to say that a bunch of people traveled a few hundred miles. But you realize that the novel has to move along slowly in order to build tension. It's more believable for Cronin to spell out the characters' plodding moves than to say "the vampires have now taken over the hut." There's more tension when you see characters freaking out about what's around the corner than just having a narrator flat out give you thefacts.
Second, The Passage is kind of predictable. After reading several hundred pages of people slogging through desert, we can kind of guess when the vampires are going to show up. But this predictability stems from the way surprises are revealed. Again, Cronin can't just have an omniscient narrator give everything away. It's more believable if you have a baffled character uncover things with the reader. Hence, the surprises at the end of each section, like "He felt a bump. The radio must have been embedded inside."
Overall, The Passage makes for a flexible summer read. It can be simultaneously thought provoking and entertaining. At the same time, it has also satisfied my blockbuster/thriller craving for the season.
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