Passage

Rating:
Summary: What a great book!
Review: This author has done a masterful job of answering the question of life-after-death in a way that STILL leaves room for many interpretations. Yes, the story's ending gives a definite answer. Or does it? hmmmmm

I inhaled this book, literally could not put it down, and I was sorry to turn the last page and know it was finished. I even stood over the stove cooking dinner with my nose in the book!

I haven't yet read the 'Doomsday Book' but I have to take a long plane trip this week and I'm taking it with me. If that book is as good as this one was, my trip will be very pleasant, indeed.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent, terrifying, edifying novel
Review: PASSAGE takes on a phenomenon that is both physical and metaphysical, and does it with the authority of both a woman of science and of faith. This story terrified me, but at the same time moved me with the depth and unflinching detail with which its characters--who are like those people in your everyday life that you love, just regular folks who really matter to you--tackle the huge issue of near-death experiences, and in fact, death itself. The juxtaposition of ordinary, irritating, enjoyable daily life with the gritty reality of an urban hospital is the very essence of the dramatic effect of this novel. As always, Willis know what she's doing, and does it magnificently. I loved it. Don't miss it.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing & depressing
Review: By the time I was well into this book, I thought it was the best novel I had ever read. I was on the edge of my seat, breathless, turning pages until late in the night, etc., etc. About 1/3 of the way through the book, there is an amazing development. About 2/3 of the way through, there is an astonishing development. At that point, I thought "now things are REALLY going to get interesting".

But they didn't. The plot began to go in circles (yes, I know it was symbolic, but it was tiresome nevertheless), & the end was a let down - just one more loop in the endless circular plot. Not to mention depressing...the lead character deserved a better fate than that.

I have to give it 4 stars because for the most part it was exciting, the characters well-crafted, the situations realistic. Perhaps Connie Willis could "recall" the book & rewrite the last few chapters?

Rating:
Summary: Warning: May change your life.
Review: In the "acknowledgements" page at the front of this novel, Willis says that writing the book was itself a near-death experience. I can believe it. I am a big (although somewhat guilty) fan of Willis' books -- I think that she basically got me through graduate school. Her books are all about compulsives putting in 14 hour days trying to figure stuff out, stymied by senseless bureaucracies and perverse coincidences. PASSAGE starts off on familiar ground: Large hospital, un-scientific cranks, driven researchers, missed phone calls, mis-interpreted messages, insanity-provoking cafeteria and, at the center, a scientific puzzle. But after a the first third of the book, the reader finds himself staring in the mirror and seeing the skull beneath the skin. PASSAGE isn't about historical puzzles or fads, it's a book about death. Maybe the truest book about death that I have ever read. By coincidence I was reading Ernest Becker's THE DENIAL OF DEATH (a weighty psycho-analytic tome about human response to death) at the same time. And although of course they're very different books, I have to say that I think Willis came a lot closer to the truth than Becker.

Through the middle of the book, Willis caught me up in a novel mixture of dread and wonder. I hadn't been this frightened since the night before my Ph.D. thesis defense. She makes several winking references to the Julia Roberts/Kiefer Sutherland movie FLATLINERS, which also featured earnest young researchers trifling with near-death experiences. I saw that movie. It stank. But if Willis had written the script, and written it along the lines of PASSAGE, it would have caused a sensation. It would have started riots, been banned as blasphemous, been hailed as religious truth, filled the churches, emptied the churches, caused despair, joy, wonder, horror, panic and peace. Maybe it's just as well that Hollywood would have passed on it.

The final third of this book is absolutely shattering. One of the characters in this book is a charlatan who, in the tradition of the post-WWI spiritualists, comforts the living with tales of a spirit realm, and with messages from beyond the grave. In the final chapter of her book, Willis shows you what it's like to die, and to send a message from beyond the grave. Sure I know it's fiction, but it somehow has the absolute ring of truth to it. This book is not about whistling past the graveyard. I warn you now: Reading PASSAGE is a transformative experience.

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous read BUT....
Review: I have to confess to being a huge Connie Willis fan (one of the legions). I found that "Pasage" delivers all her stylistic trademarks: The fabulous secondary characters; the plot line that loops back and forth between the frustrating everyday world and some other, more magical place where revelation may be found; and of course, the runaway-train pacing that keeps one reading until exhausting hours of the night. (Someone here wrote that they finished the book in class; I was sneaking to the bathroom at *work* to read just a few more pages; eventually I had to lock the book in the truck of my car so I wouldn't get fired!)

Anyone who hasn't read Willis's other books -- the best I think are "Domesday Book" "To Say Nothing of the Dog" and "Bellwether" -- will probably love it.

Having read her other work, I think I liked "Passage" very much, but I didn't *love* it. She's really reaching here for more philosophical territory. She's more than capable of that, but in "Passage" the slapstick tone, the obsession with lists, the jabs at contemporary culture -- all the stuff that made "Bellwether" and "Dog" brilliant -- conflict with the more meditative, lyrical parts. I felt like this was really two stories breaking apart at the seams, like the two halves of the Titanic sinking. The reader constantly feels the floor going all slanty under her feet. I know that "Domesday Book" managed to mesh such disparate elements, but here it doesn't seem to work.

That said, the worst of Connie Willis is better than the best of just about anybody else. And this isn't the worst Willis, it's just not the best Willis.

Rating:
Summary: This book is SUPPOSED to be a NDE
Review: Drew, in his review, complained that reading PASSAGE was close to having a NDE. I think he was more right than he realized, in saying this. You might find the "tedious" parts of the book more intriguing if you test my hypothesis that that's EXACTLY what it is supposed to be for us.

The endless passageways in Mercy General are a metaphor for the neural pathways in the brain, as well as for the passageways one goes through in a NDE. (Or perhaps I should say, the passageways in a NDE are a metaphor for the the neural pathways in the brain.) Note that Mercy General was once three hospitals, merged into one (I think that's in ch 2.) - and the brain has three parts, cerebellum, cerebrum and amygdula, imperfectly merged together. Also, the shut down cafeteria, the closed off passageways, the white-out conditions that block out the world outside the hospital - all of these are a metaphor for the brain after heart-death but before brain-death. This also explains why there's is all that stuff about beepers being turned off, and voice-mail messages getting erased, as well as why ER has an dysfunctional communications center.

Remember, as the English teacher keeps on saying, it's all a metaphor.

Rating:
Summary: Another great book from Connie Willis
Review: Dr. Joanna Lander is a medical specialist doing research into Near Death Experiences (NDEs). She interviews near-death patients in an attempt to determine exactly what they experience, but also to understand the purpose of the NDE itself. Is it truly the soul's glimpse of the afterlife? Or is it nothing more than the scattered hallucinations of a dying brain? Her progress is frustrated by Maurice Mandrake, an evangelical doing his own "research" at the same hospital. Mr. Mandrake has his notions of NDEs and the Great Beyond, and Joanna believes his not-so-subtle suggestions to near-death patients serve to confound their memories of the actual experience.

Joanna's spirits are raised by the arrival of Dr. Richard Wright, another researcher who has developed a method of inducing NDEs without physically endangering the test subject - and he can record the brain's reaction using an advanced scanning technique.

Teaming up, Joanna and Richard begin the exasperating task of finding test subjects who haven't been contaminated by Mr. Mandrake's proselytizing, or who aren't attention-starved kooks in their own right. Joanna eventually suggests that she should become a test subject - who better than someone who has learned to ask objective, non-leading questions, and who has no preconceived notions of what to expect?

Joanna's anticipation of a quick and objective solution are soon shattered. Her NDEs are vivid, compelling and seemingly authentic. She is torn between the conviction that what she sees is just a hallucination, and a deep-seated sense of knowing that it is real. Instead of Angels, Christ, Dead Loved Ones and the Life Review, Joanna believes she is experiencing - well, I really don't want to give it away. Suffice it to say that this book will fascinate you to the very end (and at the same time exact revenge on a certain love-it-or-hate-it Hollywood disaster flick).

Passage is filled with an engaging cast of unforgettable characters. There's Coma Carl and Alzheimer-plagued Mr. Briarley, men trapped in their own private purgatories, caught between life and death. There's Mr. Wojakowski, a WWII veteran full of Pacific theatre stories who will not shut up. And Maisie, an intelligent and spirited little girl awaiting a heart transplant.

Passage is not just about the passage from life to death (although there's plenty of detail about the chemistry of dying, NDE lore and the last words of famous people). It's also about our passage through life itself, and how we have the opportunity to touch those around us and make a difference in their lives.

I highly recommend Passage for fans of the richly researched, highly detailed fiction for which Connie Willis is famous. This book is also a welcome antidote to the sappy, clichéd "non-fiction" on this topic that fills bookstore shelves today. Passage is an intriguing story that offers no easy solutions to one of life's great mysteries, yet is strangely satisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Touching, thoughtful and deep.
Review: "But she didn't"

When I read this line, which comes about four-fifths of the way through the book, my eyes teared up and I had to go do something else until I was able to start reading again. (This doesn't happen to me very often, and it shouldn't happen here, really. I don't know enough about these characters to care about them, but for some reason, I do.)

This would have been a find place to end, and an average writer might have stopped right there, having produced a solid, satisfying novel. That Willis would keep going is a gutsy thing to do -- the last fifth of the book is dangerous territory, and a misstep in tone or conviction could have ruined the story. This is an act that only a truly talented author could successfully complete.

I'm not sure, yet, what I think of the final chapters. In retrospect the ending is a perfectly logical conclusion to the story, but even as I was reading it, I was amazed that Willis had taken me there. _Passage_ is somewhat less satisfying than its cousin, _Bellwether_, but this comes from the depth and complexity of its subject matter, for which there is no closure (in this world at least), and about which the author will surely make you think.

Rating:
Summary: A great journey
Review: Willis's work has consistently been about journeys of discovery, both personal and scientific, and this novel shares that theme. This journey is through Near Death Experiences (versus time travel or dreams). At its best, it looms with a sense of emotional danger and the shocks of comprehension that match my favorite of Willis's novels -- like the awful dread as Appomatox approaches in "Lincoln's Dreams". The NDE's are a dream/hallucination (or are they?), but the consequences are real. There were moments where I almost couldn't bear to turn the page, for fear of what the next discovery was (when one subject mutters 'oh no oh no oh no' I put the book down for ten minutes before coming back to it). What makes it a four versus five star read for me is the uneven tone -- kind of melding in some of the tongue in cheekiness of "To Say Nothing of the Dog". The funny asides were cute, but dissipated rather than sharpened the tension for me. Connie Willis sets a incredibly high bar for herself, and this novel doesn't match her best (imho) -- but in the absolute I do highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Yes I did read it in three days despite the SAT's and prom..
Review: I think the lady at the bookstore was pretty tired of me calling and pestering her, because when I asked if "Passage" had arrived last Friday she just about lost it. That was the third day straight that I called, but oh well... The truth is, I love Ms. Willis and I couldn't wait for this book to arrive. And when I finished it (in pre-calc, despite getting yelled at by that horrible villain Mr. Smith. He's very Maurice Mandrake. I can definitely see him pulling that scurvy funeral trick. Anyway... turn away from the light and emerge from the parentheses) the lovefest continued. The ideas were brilliantly ingenius and original. The characters were believable and not uniformly likable (because you just can't like every character all the time or we miss that little thing called PLOT). I love the little eccentrities-- like Dr. Richard "the walking soup kitchen" Wright. Ditto on the movie references! And amen to NOT LIKING TITANIC! Now I realize that this review has been scattered and fairly random, but I want everyone to read this. I don't know if it's quite on the same altar of sainthood as "Doomsday Book" (for instance, I would love to do something like an airlift of that book, throwing free copies down at the sadly unenlightened. I mean, I couldn't really do that with "Passage" for the simple reason that it's hardcover and it would really hurt to get hit on the head with... and all this time there's been little angels telling me to exit the parentheses and receive psychic powers... Maybe I could get a book deal like Mrs. Davenport) but it is one of the best novels I have ever read. I recommend it! And I will close my review by saying that perhaps the greatest thrill in this book was the references to Denver. I live in that great city, and whenever one of the main characters would be driving somewhere, and Ms. Willis would say something along the lines of, "She went down Hampden to University" I would picture the intersection. It really added to the realism-- although I guess those unlucky and slightly damned souls who don't live here can't understand. I am deeply sorry.