Tuesday, June 08, 2010

A Journal of the Plague Century: Civilization Goes Viral. Stuff Ensues.
By Janet Maslin
Published New York Times: June 6, 2010


THE PASSAGE
By Justin Cronin
766 pages. Ballantine Books. US$27.

(NZ/Aust-Orion - NZ$39.99 A$35.00)

 I won’t lie to you,” says the colonel in charge of a hidden military installation where hush-hush medical research on the thymus gland is being conducted. “There are risks.” One of those risks, enthusiastically described by Justin Cronin in his jumbo science-fiction fantasy novel, “The Passage,” is that a viral plague will be unleashed and wipe out almost all of humanity — though not before Newsweek puts out an issue with a ghastly picture and the words “Believe It” on its cover.
Chad Batka for The New York Times

What fearsome calamity could wreak that kind of damage? Don’t expect a quick answer. This 766-page book spans a century and constitutes only the first part of a trilogy. Mr. Cronin’s epic will eventually find its way to the big screen, where visual conceits like glowing mutants, zoo animals gone berserk and corpses sun-dried till they look like beef jerky will be right at home. For now, a long, arid but sometimes genuinely jolting horror story will have to do.

Mr. Cronin (pic right) gets “The Passage” off to a vigorous start. We meet Amy Harper Bellafonte, who is modestly billed in the book’s first sentence as someone who will become “the Girl from Nowhere — the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years.” We read the e-mail messages of Jonas Abbott Lear, a Harvard professor who, if these messages are any indication, probably won’t last as long as Amy. (“How ironic that I should finally have the chance to solve the greatest mystery of all — the mystery of death itself.”) We also hear Lear’s complaint that it’s hard to apply for a research grant if the word “vampire” is anywhere in the proposal.

In “The Passage” scientists aren’t the only ones who treat “vampire” as a word to be shunned. Mr. Cronin avoids it too, preferring to use other terms when undead, bloodsucking creatures start entering his story. The trouble begins after Special Agent Brad Wolgast is sent to Texas to recruit a death row inmate for some kind of special government program. “The Passage” is elaborate and digressive enough to pause for a full explanation of how this man landed on death row.

Then things begin to go very wrong. The government program backfires. The condemned man, along with 11 others, begins feeling “a great, devouring hunger” that makes him hanker “to eat the very world.” And the virals, as these virus-infected human guinea pigs are called, get loose to wreak havoc on a colossal scale. Wolgast, who has become Amy’s protector and father figure, is caught up in the mayhem. He apparently succumbs to it, with the words “Amy, Amy, Amy” italicized in his mind.

The italics are as contagious as the virus. And Mr. Cronin begins sounding more and more like Stephen King, whose work “The Passage” often resembles, when he writes a 10-page italicized faux document describing one little girl’s account of the chaotic evacuation of Philadelphia.

This already-exhaustive book is studded with diary entries, academic papers and other ostensible evidence that its fictitious stories of destruction are true. Every now and then, as when the Gulf of Mexico is described as an oil slick, these accounts are even scarier than intended.
Janet Maslin's full review at NYT.

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