Book review: The Passage

I was a little late in getting around to reading The Passage. The book was the must-have beach read this past summer, but I'd vowed when we moved to Atlanta that I'd learn to rely on the local public library instead of subsidizing Borders. Which means getting on waiting lists for really popular books and hoping they get to me eventually, and The Passage did. The question is, was it worth the wait?

What I had heard about the book through word of mouth intrigued me. People that I know who never read vampire or science fiction raved about the book. A few reviewers did slam it as "Twilight meets The Stand," but enthusiasts outnumbered the nay-sayers.

Well, I must say the nay-sayers were wrong. It's not Twilight meets The Stand. It's The Stand meets Resident Evil with maybe a little bit of Fire Starter thrown in for good measure. Cronin does a really, really nice job of channeling Stephen King and video games. Had this novel been published by a more obviously genre publisher like TOR or DAW instead of Ballantine, the reaction would have been a tad more muted, i.e., "competent reworking of an old theme" or "formulaic post-apocalyptic potboiler." As it was, the author's previous works had not been trapped in the speculative fiction ghetto; they'd been mainstream, so this novel was treated as Serious Writing for Adults.

Pshaw. The Passage is not serious writing, at least not in the sense of mainstream novel writing. It's well-written, it's fun, it's escapist, but it's also derivative, formulaic, and contains its fair share of howlers, like the usual finding gasoline that's decades old and having it still be usable.* Cronin's work is a lot closer to Michael Crichton in spirit and execution than it is to anything by writers such as Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie. Cronin treads paths that have been traveled so many times before that they've become metaphorical expressways: the killer virus that escapes the lab, the evil military-industrial complex that wants to weaponize an idealistic scientist's work, the ever-popular "this is what happens when scientists play God" meme, the classic Good defeats Evil (and why does Evil always want to hang out in Las Vegas?). . . I'm not sure just how many authors have mined this particular vein before, but I do know you could fill a pretty goodsized convention hall with them all. It's not a bad book, it's actually quite good if you're looking for escapist reading, some mind candy with which to fritter away some time you would otherwise have spent vacuuming or watching Oprah, but it really did leave me wondering what all the fuss was about.   

Maybe the best way to describe the book would be say that Cronin is good, but he's not great. He's competent, he can string words together in a way that makes sense and flows smoothly, but he lacks the artistry of writers such as Rushdie. Maybe he'll grow into it -- or maybe he'll figure out he's created the ultimate retirement plan, a best-selling novel that's part of a trilogy (guaranteed sales for the sequels) and is also on its way to becoming a movie (supposedly being directed by the guy who directed "Cloverfield," which does not raise much hope for it being any good), so he can say goodbye to teaching snot-nosed undergraduates and kick back by a pool in Santa Barbara. 

[*I loved the sweet little old lady making paper by mixing sawdust and water. I couldn't help wondering just where the heck had she been getting sawdust from for 80 years when the settlement is described as not having had any new construction done in decades. Besides, they were still scavenging shopping malls for shoes and clothes; why didn't she just hit a Staples and stock up on notebook paper and 3-ring binders?]

Epistlatory novels

I just finished reading another epistlatory novel, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society*, and was struck again by the conceit of that particular writing technique.  For some reason, it always strikes me as the lazy way to write a book.  Cobbling together a novel by stringing together letters, journal entries, or blog posts allows the author to skip over the messy bits that can prove troublesome:  describing the setting, for example, or creating believable dialogue.

It also means, of course, that it's easy to pad out the page count -- lots of white space in the breaks between the letters (see novel mentioned above for a great example of that tactic) -- or to blame choppiness or uneven quality on deliberate authorial choices rather than weak writing skills.   Additionally, it can be a little off-putting to read, as I have in some novels, letters that contain information that no one in his or her right mind would have included in a letter sent during the historical era when the novel is set.  Chelsea Quinn Yarbro seized upon the letter-writing device a number of years ago for her St. Germain vampire series, and, let's face it, it calls for a tremendous amount of willing disbelief on the part of the reader to ignore the obvious insanity of characters discussing the downsides of being undead in letters being carried by messengers in Catholic Europe in the Middle Ages, especially when those letters are supposedly written in Latin, and the characters writing them are described as already paranoid about being spied on and/or suspected of heresy. (Fortunately for readers addicted to St. Germain since the publication of Hotel Transylvania in 1978, Yarbro salts the letters throughout the novels like the calendar pages one would see in old movies to indicate the passage of time rather than relying on them alone to carry the work.) 

One of the advantages of the epistlatory technique is that it supposedly eliminates the omniscient narrator from the story.  I'm not sure that's true.  After all, someone is picking and choosing which letters, newspaper reports, journal entries, and other material to include to tell the story -- the narrator is always going to be present in some form.  The big question actually isn't the technique -- it's does the narrator, i.e., the book,  have a story worth telling? Some epistlatory novels do, some don't.   

[*Brief review: 100% mind candy; despite its 1946-coming-to-grips-with-the-aftermath-of-WWII setting, the book is basically a piece of lightweight fluff ideal for reading on an airplane or while sitting in a doctor's waiting room. It could have been published by Harlequin.]

Addendum -- total digression:  I am now giving serious thought to changing my profile picture. The Victorian lass above looks a lot better than the demented woman with a pen I have been using.

How I feel about Twilight being released on dvd

Tee shirt available here.

Twilight

I finished reading Twilight last night. It's the first book in a series written by Stephenie Meyer, and has been a best seller in the young adult category for a couple years now. I've been hearing comparisons to the Harry Potter phenomenon when Meyer has done television appearances, and there's hype building for the movie, which is due out this fall, so decided to see what all the fuss was about.

So, what did I think of Twilight? Well, in the category of damning with faint praise, I do have to concede it's a heck of a lot better than any of the Sweet Valley High books that were popular when my girls were going through the young adult stage in reading material. It was also light years beyond the uniformly mediocre Potter books. Unlike J. K. Rowlings, Meyer can actually write.

On the other hand, Stephenie Meyer is no Paula Danziger -- although it's pretty obvious she's read a lot of Danziger (probably when she was in Danziger's target demographic herself and not as an adult). Twilight was undoubtedly influenced by Danziger classics like The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, except I found Meyer's self-centered and clueless heroine Bella a lot less likable than any of the misfits Danziger created. Danziger's characters have real problems -- as far as I could tell, the only problem Meyer's heroine has is she's so full of herself that she doesn't realize just how good her life is.

I can understand the appeal of Twilight: every tween/teen is totally convinced he or she is the one person on the planet that doesn't fit in anywhere, everyone's gone through stages where they're complete klutzes tripping over nonexistent cracks in the sidewalk and walking into doorframes, and everyone's also gone through the unable to talk honestly with parents about anything because they think the parents are too incompetent or too stupid to deal with reality. And every kid also fantasizes about being the positive center of attention even while they're feeling like the exact opposite -- and that's what Bella is in the book. She's a 17-year-old who thinks she's an unattractive outsider who will have zero friends at her new school when the reality is the opposite.

Her first day at the new school she has multiple male classmates tripping over themselves to hit on her, and she sits in classes feeling out of place not because she's feeling inadequate but because as an AP student at her huge urban high school she's already covered all the material that this pathetic little rural school is just getting to and she's having to go through the motions of needing to read any of it. Talk about catering to the ultimate tween/teen fantasy: superiority, not inferiority. Smartest kid in the school, not the dumbest. Not just one boy hitting on her, but a whole herd. There's this definite air of condescension throughout -- she's smarter than her classmates, she's smarter than her parents, she is the center of the universe.

And then she hooks up with a vampire. That's where the book definitely slides off into complete improbability, which is what fantasy is supposed to do, but there are limits. Meyer makes her vampires so over-the-top in the invulnerability category as to be unbelievable, and at the same time makes them so conspicuous in their not-quite-human auras and behavior that a whole lot of willful suspension of disbelief was required to keep reading.

Introducing the vampire does bring in the "Bella truly is the dumbest heroine ever" element. The boyfriend admits to her that he was attracted not because of her stellar personality, her sparkling wit, or even the fact she's a hottie, but because she smells good, kind of like a really prime T-Bone on the grill. He was drawn to her because she's food, kind of like a gourmet lunch unexpectedly appearing on a McDonald's menu. And then once she figures out that he truly is a vampire, what does self-centered Bella decide she wants?

To be a vampire, too, even after hearing all the downsides: having to move every couple of years because there's that awkward never growing old thing, having to constantly fight the urge to lunch on humans, not being able to go out in sun light, the ennui that sets in after a couple centuries go by and you realize that if you read one more bad piece of vampire fiction you're going to self-immolate, . . . I know Bella's rationale is that she really truly loves Edward and wants to be with him forever, but, hey, it's fairly obvious she's just dazzled by the glitzy side of vampire life: looking really good with minimal effort.

Bottom line: I'm glad I read the book, Meyer writes reasonably skillfully so it flowed easily and never felt like work (unlike those hideous Harry Potter clunkers) (or, on the adult level, the truly bad Sherilyn Kenyon fantasies), and I'm sure it won't sit very long on the Friends of the Library sale table. Am I going to bother with the rest of the series? No.