The Passage

[sawyl]

As mentioned yesterday, I spent a decent chunk of last week reading Justin Cronin's The Passage — a vampire novel with real bite. It's a bit of a wrist-breaker, especially in hardback, but it's an enjoyable read provided your arm muscles are up to the chore.

The story begins, as these things always seem to, in the near-future with a group of US academics who've shilled themselves out to the military in order to search the deepest parts of the Amazon for something that man was not meant to know. The expedition is ambushed, most of its members are killed but a handful survive, including a man infected with a virulent virus. Wasting no time, the academics do what compromised nerds do the world over and set up a morally dubious research lab in the wilds of Colorado. With the assistance of the military, the project recruits a couple of FBI agents and sends them out in the world to recruit test subjects — principally death row inmates with nothing to lose.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the US, a young waitress has been struggling to bring up her daughter, Amy, in the face of grinding poverty. Gradually, option after option closes itself off and the oman finds herself reduced to prostitution to keep her daughter fed. When this too goes wrong, she reluctantly abandons her daughter to the care of a small group of nuns. Unfortunately, this catches the eye of the bioweapons people who just happen to be on the lookout for a young child with no known relatives, who might just be able to help them test the latest strain of their virus.

This first section of the book, detailing the gradual lead up to the inevitable vampire virus outbreak, is probably the strongest part. The myth of vampirism is told in strongly material terms. It is caused by a virus, something that can be understood and altered and bent to serve the will of man. It works by stimulating a pre-existing gland in a way that greatly enhances healing and strength, and its side-effects, including an inability to tolerate light, are all accessible to science. Even the monstrous decision to use an unwilling child as a test subject can be justified by the science — the child having a more active endocrine system, might be expected to reactive differently to the adult test subjects.

But as the narrative unfolds, more and more events occur that don't seem to fit the tidy, reductive explanation of vampirism offered by the military. Some of the characters have premonitions of what is about to happen to them, while others find their dreams invaded by thoughts that are not their own. There are strong Biblical overtones to some parts of the story: nuns who hear the voice of God in nature; a project named for Noah, whose days where 950 years; a set of twelve test subjects, with Subject Zero standing above and behind his disciples like an Antichrist.

I really enjoyed the strength of the narrative drive in the first section and the nice little character details that brought the major figures to life. FBI Agent Wolgast with his failed marriage and the guilt over his dead daughter that makes him feel particularly guilty about his role in Amy's abduction. Anthony Carter, a death row inmate retrieved by Wolgast, is convincingly confused about he somehow ended up convicted of crime he didn't commit; only really guilty of caring too much for the woman who tried to save him from a life of poverty, in a desperate attempt to save herself. Even Richards, the ruthless mercenary hired by a friend in a three letter agency to do the Project Noah's dirty work, has a human quirk: a serious obsession with freecell.

The section section of the novel opens with a short account of the evacuation of the great cities in the face of the vampire virus outbreak, which neatly segues into a description of a small mountain commune, the First Colony, around 90 years after the plague. Life is harsh, although the society tries to mitigate this by keeping their children in deliberate ignorance for the first eight years of their lives, and survival depends absolutely on the powerful sodium lights that keep the virals at bay when the sun sets. The group is run by a small council in accord with a strict set of rules that manage common ownership of goods, the division of labour, and that actions that must be taken when a person comes into contact with a viral.

The plot unfolds as Peter Jaxon stands Mercy for Theo, his missing brother, waiting on the walls of the town to kill him if he should return as a viral. As Peter remembers a disastrous mission to a wind farm lower down the mountain, during which his brother was taken by the vampires and he only escaped thanks to the intervention of a mute teenage girl. The mission and the girl's subsequent arrival at the town bring out tensions that have been building within the community for a long time. Peter suffers from a desire to follow in his father's footsteps and explore the demon-haunted world, and also struggles with his jealousy of his older brother. Sarah is in love with Peter, who clearly doesn't love her; Alicia is probably in love with Peter and Peter might be in love with Alicia if he could but admit it. Michael, Sarah's brother, is a chronic nerd who, in the best traditions of post-apocalyptic nerds, knows everything about everything technical and knows that Bad Things are on the way unless he can work out who to fix them.

Although less successful, to my mind, than the opening section, there is still a lot to like about the description of the village and its society. The rules of the One Law, with their Wild West frontier feeling, are well imagined and Cronin doesn't shirk from imagining the damage that follows from the cossetting of the children and, at eight, their abrupt transition into a world where they are under constant threat.

Cronin also gives the whole colony an intense, pressure cooker feeling, where most of the older members seem to be caught in loveless marriages of convenience while the younger ones seem to smoulder for people they can't have or who don't want them. He captures this rather nicely by having one the older community members, someone known for her level-headedness, reveal an intense love of old bodice ripper novels. This allows him to give a minor character a nice humanising quirk, emphasizes how bleak life is for many of the first colonists, and how odd early 21st century life must seem in relation to the bulk of history.

This whole section reminded me very strongly of the short Shirning scenes in John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids. Both feature a menace initially thought to be acting on instinct but which, over time, appears to be showing more and more signs of intelligence and self-organisation. Both also feature a similar method of defence: at Shirning, Bill uses an electric fence to keep the triffids at bay; whereas in the First Colony, the nightlights keep the virals from attacking after the sun has set. Both novels also feature similarly feisty heroines — Alicia and Susan — who have lost their closest relatives, who've been brought up by a stepfather figure, and who have deep personal reasons for hating the alien menace. Finally, both Shiring and the colony are changed forever by the arrival of a stranger — actually in Triffids, life is upset first by the arrival of the helicopter before being shattered by the arrival of Torrence and his fascist ideas.

I also found it interesting that in the last two sections Cronin moderates the strictly scientific terms of the opening, switching from the reductive idea that the virus is stimulating an atrophied gland to an explanation that appeals to the notion that a person infected by the virus loses their soul. In a way this makes sense: science has been responsible for the collapse of civilisation, so it is logical for the survivors to want to abandon it in favour of something more immediate, more subjective, more spiritual. But it also seems quite rational in light of the evidence, given that as the book unfolds, more things happen in heaven and earth than can be explained by simply appealing to theories glands and viruses.

In the final part of the book, a group from the village decide to follow a lead to see if they can't find out more about the virus outbreak. Lead by Peter and Alicia, but heavily assisted by Michael the Circuit, they manage to fix up a couple of a military vehicles and head for Colorado. Along the way, they get caught up in a skirmish in Vegas, they meet a bunch of soldiers from Texas, and shed a few members along the route.

Although I'm not entirely convinced by the final section — and I'm not really going to say why in case I give too much away — I still found a lot to like. I particularly enjoyed the knowing moment where, in the company of the soldiers, the group sit down and watch an old version of Dracula. Cronin is actually pretty faithful to Stokers original rules — so much so, that one of the Texans is able to comment on it — while at the same time giving them his own spin.

In the end, despite minor doubts, I really enjoyed The Passage. It's an exciting, genuinely creepy vampire novel with genuinely monstrous monsters. Cronin's vampires aren't attractive. They're all teeth and hunger and bioluminescence, motivated by the minds of convicted murderers. They're an anti-Twilight vamp: very definitely not the sort of thing you'd want to bring home to mother.

Although the novel is knowing in parts — the reference to Dracula, or the comment that FBI Agents Wolgast and Doyle are a bit like Mulder and Scully — this never detracts from its appeal. It's not Cronin saying, look how clever I am, but rather a simple acknowledgment of the fact that the characters in the book — the pre-apocalyptic ones at least — have watched the same TV shows and read the same books as us and have drawn the same parallels about the narrative. If anything that makes the whole thing even more unsettling: there but for the grace of God go us...