Nothing to take seriously: Justin Cronin's "The Passage" and what makes sci-fi worth reading

"Part of Peter knew it was all fake, nothing to take seriously..." -from Justin Cronin's The Passage

A recommendation from a friend

I mentioned a few months ago that I wanted to branch out from reading literary fiction. Lit fic didn't really seem--in spite of its reputation as the serious branch of literature--to be scratching the particular itch for meaning I look for in a book. Sci-fi, despite being sometimes despised by the literary powers that be, often did give me what I wanted, so I decided to give it a more systematic try. A friend I admire a lot recommended Justin Cronin's The Passage trilogy. If I had read what it was about, I'd probably have passed on it. If I didn't respect my friend so much, I'd have quit early on. But I kept reading. Halfway through, I realized I was just never going to like it, but I pressed on to the grim end.

If you think this post is long, trying reading this book

What's in a genre?

One can get too wrapped up in the boundaries of genre. Is Vonnegut science fiction? Is Atwood science fiction? Does it matter? Is Cronin's novel sci-fi, or does the dystopian novel have its own, separate genre? Or is the novel something else altogether, like Gothic or horror?

I don't really care what category of book you call it, but I do care about what I like. There was an excellent review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road several years ago--a novel one review likened The Passage to--that, in the process of separating sci-fi from Gothic literature, hit upon an important distinction for me. Paul Kincaid argued that science fiction, with its " espousal of rationalism and its basis in the idea of an understandable universe," was not a true descendant of Gothic literature, but horror, with its "employment of wild landscapes and weather that reflect the mental landscape of the characters...its irruptions of the extraordinary and the supernatural into the mundane, (and) its sense of charged emotions," was. Because The Road is more interested in the psychological landscape than in questions like how we came to a post-apocalyptic landscape in the first place, Kincaid argues that it is more "moral parable" than "science fiction examination of a world in extremis."

That is how I saw The Passage. It was clearly more a horror novel with an interest in the meaning of good and evil than a science fiction novel interested in man's ability to compete with his environment. Yes, Cronin does, unlike McCarthy, provide a scientific basis for how the world came to be overtaken by vampires (although we never call them that, and there is even a passage that tries to paper over never calling them that by joking about how nobody ever calls them that). But it is clearly gobbledy-gook science. A virus developed by the Army somehow switches on the thymus gland, leading to...wait for it...a "hugely accelerated rate of cellular regeneration." If this is sound science, then midichlorions are the answer to the Grand Unified Theory.

The subjects of the viral research just happen to obtain the same characteristics classically attributed to vampires. Some reviewers of the book from 2010 when it came out seemed to contrast it favorably with YA vampire fiction like the Twilight series. But the book follows the same trope of "maybe myths have some basis in fact" that Twilight did:

"The teeth, the blood hunger, the immortal union with darkness--what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? A power that could be reactivated, refined, brought under control?"

This is a much abused trope in horror, that there is nothing more terrifying than what is in our psyches already. There's nothing original here. This is Gothic sentimentality in a nutshell, reading our inner conflicts into the exterior world. One reviewer insisted that the book's back-cover pitch of being about a government experiment gone wrong made it sound less impressive than it really was; I thought, though, that this description is really all the novel was, and that it never, in its rambling 800 pages, overcame its flimsy premise. (Reviewer after reviewer praised its "epic" scope, which seemed to me to just be another way of saying the book was very long.)

The eight days I spent on a book I didn't like were at least useful to me in helping to clarify what I am and am not interested in.

I wouldn't insist that a science fiction book be overly exacting about its science. There are few writers with the science chops to do that, and fewer still who could do it in an interesting way. But that doesn't mean throwing all credibility to the wind. Or if you do--if your interest is in examining something other than human ingenuity against a world that has changed in some aspect--then you cannot pair junk science with the wish to be taken seriously. Vonnegut used junk science all the time, but he was writing darkly humorous satire. Cronin was trying to have it both ways, waving a magic wand to get vampires, but also wanting to appear to have something deeply serious to say about the human soul.

You may stop reading here unless you really want to get the fruits of me reading a book way past the point of diminishing returns.

But is it a good book?

Kincaid insisted that although The Road wasn't science fiction, it was still an excellent novel. The Passage might not have been what I wanted, but was it good for what it was?

It was fascinating to me to read this book knowing Cronin was not only once a literary fiction writer, but actually came from the the Iowa Writers' program, ground zero of lit fic in America. I wondered if he would slip some writerly techniques into his vampire novel meant for mass consumption.

He did not. I'm amazed at the kind reception he got for this book from serious reviewers. Cronin seems to have abandoned everything one is taught in a writing program on the way to making hella money. Maybe it's a pointless project of me to list all the faults in the novel eight years after its release, but since I just spent 20 hours of my life reading this book, I feel I should spend at least an hour or so giving back to the world what made those 20 hours so painful.

Keep in mind, this list is greatly shortened from all the sins I found to object to.

1. Adjectives 

Any basic writing tutorial will warn writers about using too many vague adjectives. While great writers can sometimes ignore the rules, this is a very hard rule to break effectively. Cronin littered the novel with adjectives that were used to avoid the hard work of rendering a scene more fully. Here are a few examples:

Large: used about 70 times
Examples: "...set eyes and graying hair, with large hands good for work..."
                  "...long hair, prematurely gray, and large eyes, permanently damp with sympathy."
                  "...a large man with a heavy beard and powerful arms and a genial manner..."

Wide: used about 80 times
Examples: "...the big houses and wide, princely lawns of old Midtown..."
                  "Her eyes grew very wide"
                 (twenty pages later) "...their eyes wide with alarm..."
                 (nine pages later) "The soldier's eyes were wide with panic."

Long: Difficult to determine, because of words like "along," but at least 100 uses as an adjective
Examples: "...the clawlike hands and the long teeth crowding the mouth..."
                  "...pale skin and long lashes that curled upward at the ends..."


I could go on and on with the adjectival sins. Smooth, vague, slender, tall, and mild all make frequent appearances. He had to use these adjectives rather than render scenes more imaginatively, because he just included so much crap in the book he could have edited out. But let's move on.

2. Terrible or trite similes

Examples: "...fierce blue eyes, a chin that looked like it had been chiseled from stone..."
                  "...as if the muscles of his arms were hung on bars of iron."

3. Failed attempts to be poetic

Examples: "...a series of dancelike movements: bodies converging and separating, flung for brief periods into wider orbits, only to be drawn back again under the influence of some unknown power, a force as calm and inevitable as gravity."

"That was when it had occurred to Jane that the thing she'd seen was love. It could be nothing less than the force of love that had lifted Teacher into the air, into the waiting arms of the glowing bear-man, whose light was the radiance of royalty."

"Water blue like he'd never seen before." (A cheat way of describing something you can't figure out how to describe is to say the character can't describe it.)

4. Abuse of the Garcia-Marquez "looking forward to looking back" trick 

At the beginning of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez begins thus: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” That's one of the greatest beginnings to a book ever. Cronin does this maybe 50 times in the novel, where we flash-forward to a character flashing back to the event being described. He begins many chapters this way. He also uses it over and over to convey that something has happened that leaves such an impression on the characters, they are still trying to interpret it years later. The first line of the book does this. It shows up in the middle of action sequences. ("Later, Peter would recall the scene as a sequence of discrete details.") It very much began to feel like a writer who didn't know another way to begin a chapter or to convey that something important was happening. 

5. Length

This book did not need to be so long. The first 275 pages could have been done away with, or shortened to one chapter of about 40 pages. After we see the world fall apart in pages 1 to 275, we flash forward 100 years to a colony of survivors. (All of the main characters here, in a move I'm sure had nothing to do with movie considerations, are the perfect YA age.) These survivors end up learning everything that happened in the first section anyway. 

Cronin's choice of continually shifting POV helps the reader to spread his sympathies wide, but it also adds to the length, often unnecessarily. There is a brief section in the POV of Leon, a guard at a camp who gets knocked out by the main characters. We literally never see him before or after this, and the only point of the section is to let us know that the bad guy is coming. 

And now, the plot holes

How much should plot holes matter? During the debates a few months back about whether the latest Star Wars movie was good, some apologists for the movie claimed that looking too deeply into plot holes ignored the point of a Star Wars movie. I'm sympathetic to this. It is possible to get lost in the picayune details and ignore the bigger story going on. But this story is really mired in plot holes, and that's even allowing for a virus that turns on a gland to make people into vampires.  

Two-thirds of the book is 100 years after the big vampire extinction event. In spite of that, the characters often eat food canned before the event. (One survivalist site I checked said the max date for canned food is 30 years. It might go longer, but it needs to be stored at a constant, cool temperature yet also never freeze. There should never be dents in the cans. None of this is true of the food our heroes find.)

They fix up 100-year-old cars and drive on 100-year-old tires with 100-year-old gas. They keep lights on to beat back the vampires with 100-year old power stations and 100-year-old batteries. There is one mechanic-electrician-genius who knows how to fix all of these things. 

To be fair, the book tries to acknowledge these things by having the characters bring up how you have to check the canned foods to make sure they're still good, and they do mention how hard it is to keep old rubber going. But having made these objections, they still eat canned food a lot in the book as they wander, and they drive those old tires over hundreds of miles. It felt like Cronin wrote the book, realized there were plot holes, tried to patch it over with a little bit of self-acknowledgment, then left all the holes. 

Speaking of which, how are the roads 100 years in the future even in any condition to drive on? In one section, we see a road overgrown with grass and gone back to nature, but for most of the adventure, the kids drive hundreds of miles on the highway from California to Utah and we don't ever read about a pothole.  

I was a Marine. I can tell you that if your battalion has twenty hummers in the motor pool, you're lucky if two of them actually work. But these folks manage to come across a bunch of old hummers that have zero replacement parts, fix them up, resuscitate the tires, the batteries, and so on, and drive from California to Las Vegas. They get in gun fights. They plow over stuff. The things keep working. 

It had the feel of just not wanting to keep figuring out how they got from one place to another or how they kept finding something to eat, so the author waved a magic wand over it. 

Or maybe Cronin got promotional consideration from the Hummer makers to make it look like their stupid vehicles actually work. 

Then there's the whole issue of how some rag-tag group of people are able to do what the whole of American might could not do by keeping the vampires at bay. There is some explanation of this when we realize that the vampires have become weakened after eating up nearly all the prey in America. But still, all it takes for one Colony to survive are walls and lights. You're telling me the U.S. Government couldn't have managed that? One character muses about how the world used to have so much electricity it was literally flooded with lights. How did our current world fail to build walls and turn on lights when the future can keep the lights on with 100-year-old equipment and a teenage engineer?

Cynical story-writing

I don't understand why Twilight gets hate for being fluff teenager stuff while The Passage gets a pass. At least the author of Twilight, I take it, wrote about what she really liked, while Cronin seems to have cynically written his way to $3.7 million based on a craze someone else started. There is nothing in this book that suggests it should be taken seriously where Twilight should be disregarded. In fact, the suggestion that this book is somehow better strikes me as possibly sexist. They're both brain candy. We shouldn't give one of them gravitas it didn't earn. 

I get it. People love this book. Stephen King thinks it's brilliant. Maybe I'm completely wrong. One reviewer after another (and my friend, who I still very much respect in spite of this one book) talked about how they were sucked into it after 30 pages. I pretty much hated it from the words "cellular regeneration."

Maybe I shouldn't make too much of having a different opinion from the rest of the world. I generally just don't like horror. So maybe this was just not the right recommendation for me, and I'm obtusely complaining that this Gothic story isn't a brainy sci-fi story. But it's a little unnerving to me to feel so strongly about a book so many other people like. It makes me feel like I have no idea what's good. Because if I'm wrong about this book, I'm really, really wrong.