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The Passage
Oct. 5th, 2024 01:40 pmAfter enjoying The Ferryman by Justin Cronin recently, I had his 'zombie/vampire' series recommended to me and managed to get hold of all three second hand for a very reasonable price. I decided to save the first instalment - The Passage - to take on holiday with me, ambitiously expecting to finish it (and also another equally chunky book) while I was away. It actually took me a further four days after the end of the holiday to get through it, but I enjoyed it overall.
It's nearly 900 pages long and it's actually more like a full trilogy in and of itself. The first 300 pages introduce how the virus is created and ends up getting released into the world. At the end of this section, there are very few of the initial characters left to carry over into the next section, plus it jumps over 90 years, so it's really like starting a whole new book. This section presents a hold-out Colony of human survivors in California and how an unexpected arrival from outside turns their whole existence upside-down. The third section follows directly on from the second, with a lot of the same characters, but it's about a small group of them leaving the Colony on a mission to trek halfway across the continent, so it changes tone and setting quite a lot again.
Anyway, presenting a story of such grand scope is a bold choice, especially with the massive time jump in the middle - but it mostly works. It's a bit jarring, but it's much more interesting to explore the long-term effects of the virus on society than it would be just to have the running and screaming of the initial outbreak (though even that happens largely off-page, with one of the characters getting sporadic updates from occasional visits to a gas station from his mountain hideaway).
There were places where I felt the story dragged, and it was pretty grim in parts (not unexpectedly) but it certainly went to some interesting places and kept me engaged throughout. And it's only the first part - with the other two books also being quite lengthy (though not as long as this one).
I am intrigued to see where the story goes, but I think I might leave it a while before venturing on to the sequel.
It's nearly 900 pages long and it's actually more like a full trilogy in and of itself. The first 300 pages introduce how the virus is created and ends up getting released into the world. At the end of this section, there are very few of the initial characters left to carry over into the next section, plus it jumps over 90 years, so it's really like starting a whole new book. This section presents a hold-out Colony of human survivors in California and how an unexpected arrival from outside turns their whole existence upside-down. The third section follows directly on from the second, with a lot of the same characters, but it's about a small group of them leaving the Colony on a mission to trek halfway across the continent, so it changes tone and setting quite a lot again.
Anyway, presenting a story of such grand scope is a bold choice, especially with the massive time jump in the middle - but it mostly works. It's a bit jarring, but it's much more interesting to explore the long-term effects of the virus on society than it would be just to have the running and screaming of the initial outbreak (though even that happens largely off-page, with one of the characters getting sporadic updates from occasional visits to a gas station from his mountain hideaway).
There were places where I felt the story dragged, and it was pretty grim in parts (not unexpectedly) but it certainly went to some interesting places and kept me engaged throughout. And it's only the first part - with the other two books also being quite lengthy (though not as long as this one).
I am intrigued to see where the story goes, but I think I might leave it a while before venturing on to the sequel.
