Two By Two

Author : Justin Cronin
Title : The Passage
 Published : 12/05/2011
Pages : 1008
Genre : Horror / Science fiction
Publisher : Orion



    
     Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old and her mother thinks she's the most important person in the whole world. She is. Anthony Carter doesn't think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row. He's wrong. FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming. It is.

    I have been looking at my TBR for a while now thinking I should try to reduce it some as it has got way out of hand. Sat right at the bottom where it has been for the last four years was my copy of The Passage. It had been recommending to me by someone I use to work with and he made it sound like a great read. My problem is the sheer size of the thing I kept putting it off until the point I had forgotten it. So I figure it was time to just get on with it or else it would still be there in another four years.

     The story follows three main characters in the lead up to the apocalypse It sounded like an interesting prospect. What I think we usually get is the after mouth when the world has gone to hell. What scant information we are fed is usually in the form of flashbacks or someone telling another character of how things used to be. I was also curious to see how the authors choice of charters would reflect this given there different backgrounds and ages. 

     So as you can imagine this book took me a while to get through. After four days of reading before and after work and on my lunch break I made it to the end. Even with it's one thousand and eight pages the author still manages to pack a lot of information in. What I hadn't approached going in was that this story covers both sides of the event that changes the world forever. I suppose it is better to think of it as to novels in one cover.

     During the first half of the book, we get introduced to the three people who will have an effect on how the walls coming tumbling down. I found it funny how in turn I felt sorry for each of our heroes for different reasons. While they each come from different economic backgrounds and social statuses they are all thrown into events beyond there control. Although I think it was Amy that I felt the most empathy for. Here is a world that is spun out of control by the adults in it. She is left in a constant state of uneasy and to a lot of extents paranoia. Having been let down so many times she finds it hard to know who to trust. The emotional abuse she suffers causes her to form a hard shell leaving her seeming very diffusional.

     So to the halfway point and here comes the time shift. Jumping decades into the future and to a world that has been torn apart. At first, I found this a little disappointing, I had got used to our small band of charters. It is not so much that I knew what they would do in a situation as it was an emotional connection. But what happened at the end of the present day section is what it is. I cant think of any other book I've read which then asks you to start from scratch with new people and try and make you care for them in the same way as the ones you started with. For me, this worked to some effect. This group is a very different breed. Whereas with the first lot these are to varying degrees people you would meet in your every day lives, the second is broken by the world they live in. The rules they live by are there to keep them safe from the terrors that live beyond there walls.  In a lot of ways there reminded me of Rick and his band of followers from later seasons of The Walking Dead.

     For the most part, this was a story I enjoyed, the author is great at building worlds. His use of these giant sandboxes gives the story a very epic and grand feeling in nature.  Befitting for a story of how the world ended. The story itself did feel captivating in a way I didn't think a tail of vampires could. For the most part, there are some new takes on an age-old tale. It takes the mythos back to its root long before Hollywood got its hands on it. These are creatures not only driven by animal instinct but also ones that are created. For me, it defiantly felt like shades of I Am Legend although more the film than the book. But while there where a lot of things I did enjoy about this book it was not all sunshine and roses.  Some of the sections of dialogue come across very clunky to the point early on where I nearly put the book down. But momma didn't raise no quitter and so I preserved. It also felt like at times the pages were filled with words just to fill out the book. Things were repeated over and again and I was given information that didn't really go anywhere.

     If you were to take this story as a whole and boil it down what you are left with is the story of Amy. It' is not a pleasant one, the things she goes through would destroy most of us. As a child, she manages to rise above this even if she doesn't entirely understand her place in the apocalypse. The scenes between her and agent  Wolgast where some of my favorites in the book. Even with her limited emotional range, there is still moment of warmth between them. So overall this book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Maybe if it had been split into two books it would have been easier to digest.