cougarguard.com — unofficial BYU Cougars / LDS sports, football, basketball forum and message board  

Go Back   cougarguard.com — unofficial BYU Cougars / LDS sports, football, basketball forum and message board > non-Sports > Art/Movies/Media/Music/Books

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 07-28-2010, 04:04 AM   #1
MikeWaters
Demiurge
 
MikeWaters's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 36,363
MikeWaters is an unknown quantity at this point
Default The Passage by Justin Cronin

My wife bought this book for my birthday. I had never heard of it, or the author. I started reading blind, not even reading the dust jacket, just that my wife said it was a kind of apocalyptic-type novel. Ok, good enough for me.

Now, I've reached a stage in my life where I don't have a lot of time to start reading books. And I am often inclined to not finish the books I have started. This is a 766 page book, and I finished it in a few days. So we will start on the basis that it was good enough for me to choose to finish it, and fairly quickly.

A word about the author--he is a professor at Rice, he graduated with an MFA from Iowa Writer's Workshop (famous). He won a PEN/FAULKNER award for previous novel. So this is an almost somebody who has shifted genres into this particular book--which is a kind of thriller/zombie/SHTF book. Cronin is willing to go all over the place, and shift genres as he goes, he uses different techniques, such as 3rd person omniscient and first person journaling from several people. I found myself guffawing more than once, but he is a good enough writer to draw you along. There is a literary feel to this that helps it go beyond the average summer-reading fare.

There, I said it. Summer-reading fare. That is not particularly a compliment. I'm not big into the apolcalyptic/SHTF genre, but certainly any book that dives into this area must be compared, whether fair or not, to McCormac's The Road. Which to some degree is like comparing the Gettysburg Address to a Dungeons and Dragons manual. This is an almost literary thriller, not nearly the same kind of dark journey that The Road is. And thus, it is not nearly as moving.

I'm not going to give up too much of the plot here. You have an assortment of characters who are trying to survive in a world that has become populated with vampire zombies (a virus accidentally unleashed by....da dum...the US military). Does Cronin create a world of interest? Yes. Is this world a tour de force of the imagination, whether dark or not? No. Does he create interesting characters? Yes. Are they characters that I care about on a visceral level? No. You know that constant dread that was in The Road? It's not here. It should be, given how awful the situation is for our brave heroes. But it's not. And I think that these things are the primary failings of this novel. Characters of average value in situations that often feel like they were scripted for a movie.

Speaking of movies, Ridley Scott bought the movie rights two years before the book was published, and his production company is thanked in the afterword. So yeah, it reads like it was scripted for a movie.

Now, I am fine with reading things that are not high literature. I enjoyed the Harry Potter series. But let's face it, the first Harry Potter novel was not very good. It showed promise, but it was flat and immature. I suspect (and hope) that the same is the case for The Passage. There are many passages in this book that are beautifully written. Cronin does have a turn of the phrase. It would not surprise me at all if the next two books in this forthcoming series are really much better.

I think you'll be hearing a fair amount about this book. Whether it becomes some kind of cultural touchstone, we shall see.
MikeWaters is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 07-29-2010, 04:25 AM   #2
MikeWaters
Demiurge
 
MikeWaters's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Posts: 36,363
MikeWaters is an unknown quantity at this point
Default

A pretty lame NY Times review. Just regurgitating the plot.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/bo...book.html?_r=1
MikeWaters is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT. The time now is 03:48 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.2
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.