Post 289: The Passage

The Passage by Justin Cronin.  ISBN: 9780345504968.

I think I would be remiss if I didn't share at least one passage from, uh, The Passage with you.  I find some of Cronin's punctuation choices a bit weird, but I am assuming that he meant to have some sentences be short and choppy and others long and windy to capture the tone of this book.  After a while it stopped bothering me so much and I was able to just read and read and get carried away.  Here's one of my favorite sections (of which I actually have many):

"A thousand recollected lives were passing through her, a thousand stories -- of love and work, of parents and children, of duty and joy and grief.  Beds slept in and meals eaten, and the bliss and pain of the body, and a view of summer leaves from a window on a morning it had rained; the nights of loneliness and the nights of love, the soul in its body's keeping always longing to be known." Page 722.

I like this because it reminds me of the feeling I get from reading.  It was referring to something completely different of course, but every time I read or listen to a new story it feels like this passage to me.  It feels like the souls and lives of others are going through me, and I get to keep little bits and pieces of memory from this life or that life.  I get to feel my soul awaken to the plights of these fictional characters.

I guess you could say that reading has almost always been a religious experience for me.  There is something mystical and magical about being able to experience the lives of other people in such a way, even to create the lives of other people.  Even the words on the page themselves are completely awe inspiring in the sense that these tiny shapes are able to convey meaning and emotion to me, and that someone else was the author of that meaning.

On some level I understand the mechanics of reading and how it works in the brain.  It's mostly a matter of shape recognition.  We are able to recognize certain shapes as being certain things.  For instance, a tree has a wide variety of shape variances, but has pretty standard characteristics once you begin to narrow down what is a tree versus what isn't a tree.  We actually all have pictures in our minds of what "tree" is, for some of us it's a palm or an oak or a willow, etc. and this is the image our brain uses when recognizing whether or not something is a tree.  In the case of letters, they represent a variation of sounds, in conjunction with other letters that dictates what sound it forms.  One could argue that we don't have the same attachment to letters as we do to "tree", but I imagine it works on a pretty similar principle, and more so when letters appear in certain combinations.

But the mere fact that our brain can learn to do this is simply amazing to me.  That any human being can learn to communicate in this way is sort of like a miracle.  I don't think I've ever grown weary or bored of the experience of reading itself.  I may not like a certain book I'm reading, but I can still step outside of it and say, "How cool is it that I actually know what this person is trying to tell me and they wrote it last year or last century and in a different state."  Does anyone else feel this way when they're reading or is it just me?  Is it because I had such a difficult time learning to read, and then it just felt like it clicked all of a sudden?  Have you had any "religious" moments while reading?  Why do you do it, how does it make you feel?  Are there other quotes that describe your reading experiences that you'd like to share?

There is a great video interview with Justin Cronin and librarian Nancy Pearl.  It's on the longish side, but if you've already read the book or are thinking about it, this will help you enjoy it even more.  Since this has so much hype, here is a review with trepidation from The Word Zombie.  I thought it only appropriate to include a positive (but still pointing out flaws), if very detailed review from Love Vampires, no spoilers though; they talk about theme, character, character development, plot development, etc.
LibsNote: Copy from the library.

Post 288: The Passage

The Passage by Justin Cronin.  ISBN: 9780345504968.

Another thing this book did, that I think it did very well, was the divergence of cultures.  We saw three post-Bad Shit Happened societies, all of which had their own customs and languages.  One was militarized, one was governed by households in a sort of mostly predetermined roles in society sort of thing, and the last I feel is a bit too spoilery to talk about in detail, but let's just say it was pretty cult-like.

The thing he succeeded with most was the diverging of language.  Each group had their own term for the "vampires."  They were known as smokes, virals, and dracs and each community more or less stuck to their word of choice when referring to them.  There were other language developments that occurred in the book to refer to certain aspects of life in the Post-Bad (as I will now refer to any such event in a book, from now on and forever).  I think I'll talk about two of my favorites, mostly because there are lots of these in here, and uh, I'm sure you'd like to enjoy discovering them for yourself.

My first favorite phrase is "living in his own time now."  This happened whenever people knew they were dying or doing something dangerous that would likely get them killed.  I like it because it implies that people who are close to death, either because they are sick or in dangerous professions, sort of live in a time outside of everyone else.  You can almost feel what people mean when they say it, and it definitely invokes the whole "everyone dies alone" philosophy and kind of amplifies it by ten.  It's as if, not only are they dying alone, but they aren't even on the same level existence as everyone else anymore.  And I have to imagine that's what it would feel like to be that close to death and to know that you are that close to death.

My second phrase is probably "taken up."  This probably doesn't seem like it's all that important, but if you can imagine something worse than death, something like becoming a violent blood-sucking monster, wouldn't you come up with a euphemism for it?  And that is exactly what this is.  Instead of saying, "he became a viral/drac/smoke" these people say that someone was taken up.  It is somehow more powerful to say it this way, even though they are not directly referring to what is happening.  It's probably because using this phrase does a better job of displaying exactly how afraid people are of becoming vampires and how distasteful and discomforting it is to even talk about it in the Post-Bad.

I will say one thing against Cronin, I don't think he did enough of this.  Given that these pockets of civilization became completely isolated from each other, and in completely different areas of the country,  I'm pretty sure the language would have diverged more than it did in the novel.  Still, I think it was an excellent attempt, and probably something that a less adept novelist would have overlooked.  For anyone who read the book, what did you think of these linguistic developments?  Or are there others books you've enjoyed that have explored this aspect of language?

There is a great video interview with Justin Cronin and librarian Nancy Pearl.  It's on the longish side, but if you've already read the book or are thinking about it, this will help you enjoy it even more.  Since this has so much hype, here is a review with trepidation from The Word Zombie.  I thought it only appropriate to include a positive (but still pointing out flaws), if very detailed review from Love Vampires, no spoilers though; they talk about theme, character, character development, plot development, etc.
LibsNote: Copy from the library.

Post 287: The Passage

The Passage by Justin Cronin.  ISBN: 9780345504968.

One of the things I liked most about this novel is that Cronin doesn't feel the need to stick with characters once their contributions to the story are over.  This is kind of a problem with many narratives told in third person.  Yes, the third person narrator is great because it can be omnipotent, but does it really need to be?  Fantasy seems to suffer most from this predicament.  I don't know if authors feel we become totally invested in the lives of every single character, and therefore need to know the end narrative of all of the characters, or if fantasy writers just really enjoy neat little bundles tied up with string.

Oh sure, this book follows a lot of characters.  In fact, there is a century's worth.  In the second part of the book, we meet a whole community of them, with about 20 being worthy of names and individual traits, but Cronin seems to know when to let them go on living off screen.  I liked that.  It allowed my mind to wonder and worry about those characters I only got brief hints of, but who obviously had loves and hates and fears and hopes for the future.  It felt like the story was a stone or maybe a set of stones, and anywhere from one to three characters had a stone at any given time.  Whoever had the stone was the person whose narrative we followed.  Once they left a place, we didn't see that place again.  Once someone parted company from the stone-carrier, we lost all knowledge of that person unless they had a stone of their own.

It worked.  It worked really well.  I didn't need to know what was happening to Amy during the 90 or so years she wasn't involved in the story.  It wasn't important.  I was curious about it, but I feel that Cronin filled in missing details where they were necessary, rather than throwing them in just because they were interesting.  Besides, there are two other books to this series, so I imagine we'll get more back story, if and when it is necessary.

I really have to hand it to Cronin, this technique worked perfectly for his story.  It managed to create a sense of uncertainty about what was happening in a very uncertain world.  I don't think it would have held the same tone if we were constantly being given peeks at what was happening to the people that were left behind so that the others could hopefully find a way to change the world.  It rang more true than having someone pop in with a scene about little Jimmy and how he gasped his last breath as blah, blah, blah.  We're done with Jimmy, it doesn't really matter to the story if he lives or dies anymore, leave him, his story is done.  And so is this post, good day, sir!

There is a great video interview with Justin Cronin and librarian Nancy Pearl.  It's on the longish side, but if you've already read the book or are thinking about it, this will help you enjoy it even more.  Since this has so much hype, here is a review with trepidation from The Word Zombie.  I thought it only appropriate to include a positive (but still pointing out flaws), if very detailed review from Love Vampires, no spoilers though; they talk about theme, character, character development, plot development, etc.
LibsNote: Copy from the library.