From the Bookshelf: Passage
Jun. 11th, 2019 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWorking my way down a pile of books I’d bought at the city library’s “spring reads sale” a few months before, I came at last to the conviction it was time to leave the remaining nonfiction for later and read one of the novels I’d found. That I’d managed that at all had seemed something given how often for the past several years I pass by fiction sections without so much as picking up a volume to see if its blurb does anything (even as I take in “stories” in media less respectable than prose). Still, taking the next step onto a knife edge between “what if I just think it beneath me?” and “what if it just goes over my head?” had stayed a little intimidating in itself.
For one of the novels, that old-fashioned draw of the author’s name had first caught my attention. Years ago, the educational-channel speculative fiction talk show “Prisoners of Gravity” had talked up Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, and not that long afterwards I’d found a paperback of it in a used book store. The time travel story, with its slow build and wallop of a payoff, had had an impact on me, and I’ve read it more than once and often over the Christmas season it’s set during, although not lately. A fair while after that I’d found a used copy of her To Say Nothing of the Dog, set in the same time travel milieu although with a rather different mood to it. Then, before the Science Fiction Book Club went out of business, I bought two linked volumes by her, only to see someone’s dismissal in unspecific terms of them before I could get around to reading them, such that they’re still sitting in my basement. That I couldn’t recall having heard of a book by her called Passage was interesting, but even as I bought it from the library book sale I could ask myself “and what if there’s a reason I haven’t heard of it?”
I was aware the book didn’t have ”science fiction” branding on its cover, even if the copy of Doomsday Book I’d found hadn’t been too obvious that way. It started off “here and now,” too, taking on a very big subject. Its main character Joanna Lander was trying to interview a patient about her near-death experience intent on getting past mysticism and wishful thinking even as she kept bumping against a pompous, self-promoting fraud skilled at leading patients on to report their experiences in encouraging, New Age-religious ways. When Joanna happens to hear another doctor, Richard Wright, has found a safe way to create and monitor synthetic near-death experiences she gets in touch with him after a certain amount of telephone tag, which definitely reminded me of Doomsday Book even if Passage was written and set just as cell phones were becoming commonplace (and a cell phone does cause its own difficulties later in the book). Just as I was thinking the novel was “a more thoughtful take on something the movies had sensationalized years before,” Richard explains to Joanna that his method isn’t like Flatliners and doesn’t risk the life of the person having the experience. Even so, I was willing now to see the novel as an edge case on the fuzzy borders of science fiction regardless of how it was being packaged (which may be more important than some intent on finding more serious definitions of the genre will acknowledge), and the first chapters did keep me wanting to keep up with the story.
When Joanna has further trouble getting information from Richard’s first subjects, though, she starts trying the experiences herself. This much was described in the blurb on the back cover, but when Joanna realises just what the light at the end of her own passage is I was ready to think Connie Willis was invoking another and rather talked-up movie from just a few years before she had written the novel. It might have been implied from the first chapter epigraphs, which usually amount to “famous last words,” but I did still wonder if this would have been “too reactive” or “too ready to try and cash in” for some. (I was also wondering, though, if the novel’s resemblance to science fiction might be increased should one of the epigraphs invoke the last moments of the space shuttle Challenger or even Apollo 1, and then “Roger, go at throttle up (static)” did appear.)
After many speculations and meditations on mortality inside and outside of near-death experiences among a growing and developing cast of characters a theory to explain things formed, if seemingly still some distance from the end of the book. Then, though, a “it may be the point that it’s sudden and unfair” moment changed things, and the question became whether the theory would reach others and be accepted. As that developed and plot momentum built, my compulsion to follow the story forward became stronger again, all the way to the end. It was a satisfying conclusion for me, but I did wind up wondering if others might have had sudden and sharper reactions about “demanding an uncompromising lack of possible interpretations.” Still, that I’d got through another novel and found it compelling was something. When I do manage to start reading a new novel, that might even happen more often than I expect it to.
For one of the novels, that old-fashioned draw of the author’s name had first caught my attention. Years ago, the educational-channel speculative fiction talk show “Prisoners of Gravity” had talked up Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, and not that long afterwards I’d found a paperback of it in a used book store. The time travel story, with its slow build and wallop of a payoff, had had an impact on me, and I’ve read it more than once and often over the Christmas season it’s set during, although not lately. A fair while after that I’d found a used copy of her To Say Nothing of the Dog, set in the same time travel milieu although with a rather different mood to it. Then, before the Science Fiction Book Club went out of business, I bought two linked volumes by her, only to see someone’s dismissal in unspecific terms of them before I could get around to reading them, such that they’re still sitting in my basement. That I couldn’t recall having heard of a book by her called Passage was interesting, but even as I bought it from the library book sale I could ask myself “and what if there’s a reason I haven’t heard of it?”
I was aware the book didn’t have ”science fiction” branding on its cover, even if the copy of Doomsday Book I’d found hadn’t been too obvious that way. It started off “here and now,” too, taking on a very big subject. Its main character Joanna Lander was trying to interview a patient about her near-death experience intent on getting past mysticism and wishful thinking even as she kept bumping against a pompous, self-promoting fraud skilled at leading patients on to report their experiences in encouraging, New Age-religious ways. When Joanna happens to hear another doctor, Richard Wright, has found a safe way to create and monitor synthetic near-death experiences she gets in touch with him after a certain amount of telephone tag, which definitely reminded me of Doomsday Book even if Passage was written and set just as cell phones were becoming commonplace (and a cell phone does cause its own difficulties later in the book). Just as I was thinking the novel was “a more thoughtful take on something the movies had sensationalized years before,” Richard explains to Joanna that his method isn’t like Flatliners and doesn’t risk the life of the person having the experience. Even so, I was willing now to see the novel as an edge case on the fuzzy borders of science fiction regardless of how it was being packaged (which may be more important than some intent on finding more serious definitions of the genre will acknowledge), and the first chapters did keep me wanting to keep up with the story.
When Joanna has further trouble getting information from Richard’s first subjects, though, she starts trying the experiences herself. This much was described in the blurb on the back cover, but when Joanna realises just what the light at the end of her own passage is I was ready to think Connie Willis was invoking another and rather talked-up movie from just a few years before she had written the novel. It might have been implied from the first chapter epigraphs, which usually amount to “famous last words,” but I did still wonder if this would have been “too reactive” or “too ready to try and cash in” for some. (I was also wondering, though, if the novel’s resemblance to science fiction might be increased should one of the epigraphs invoke the last moments of the space shuttle Challenger or even Apollo 1, and then “Roger, go at throttle up (static)” did appear.)
After many speculations and meditations on mortality inside and outside of near-death experiences among a growing and developing cast of characters a theory to explain things formed, if seemingly still some distance from the end of the book. Then, though, a “it may be the point that it’s sudden and unfair” moment changed things, and the question became whether the theory would reach others and be accepted. As that developed and plot momentum built, my compulsion to follow the story forward became stronger again, all the way to the end. It was a satisfying conclusion for me, but I did wind up wondering if others might have had sudden and sharper reactions about “demanding an uncompromising lack of possible interpretations.” Still, that I’d got through another novel and found it compelling was something. When I do manage to start reading a new novel, that might even happen more often than I expect it to.