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mtvessel25 Feb 2005
Passage - Connie Willis - Voyager 2002
* * * * *
(Another review postponed from last year. Again, apologies if anyone finds it upsetting.)
This was the final book I read in 2004, and if I were to nominate my book of the year, this would probably be it. This extraordinary novel is funny, moving, troubling, profound and highly original both in its construction and in the effects it sets out to achieve, and I won't forget it in a hurry.
It is set in a hospital and its ostensible subject is Near Death Experiences (NDEs), the hallucinatory state reported by some people who recover from coding (cardiac arrest). Actually, it's about far more than that - it's about what people experience as they approach death (a question which haunts anyone who has had to make decisions about a dying friend or relative). Its about science and how science is done. And it's about human foolishness - how we are not in control, how we confabulate and jump to irrational conclusions, and yet can discover truths and communicate them with each other.
The protagonist is a doctor, Joanna Lander, a psychologist who is interviewing patients who have had NDEs in an attempt to identify the common features. Her research is constantly thwarted by the nearest thing that the book has to a villain - Maurice Mandrake (splendid name!), an author who also interviews NDE patients but ruins them for Joanna's purposes by asking leading questions that cause them to fit their observations into a conventional religious narrative. After a classic screwball comedy of misunderstandings she teams up with Richard Wright, a doctor who is also investigating NDEs but from a neurochemical viewpoint in the hope of developing a technique to revive people who have coded. He has found a drug that creates temporary NDE-like symptoms and is looking for volunteers to try it on - Joanna can help him out by getting accurate descriptions from the test subjects of what they experienced. When all the volunteers prove unsuitable for one reason or another, Joanna volunteers to undergo the experiment herself. Her own repeated NDE experiences, though surreal and dreamlike, are naggingly familiar, and she becomes obsessed with finding out more...
The foregoing might suggest a few obvious genre bolt-holes down which the story could go. A horror story, perhaps, or a medical or psychological thriller, or a rather overlong preparation for a transfer to a fantasy world or alternate universe. Or maybe a romance (Richard is tall, blond, cute and available, as Joanna's paramedic friend Vielle points out). All I can say is that if you come to this book with any genre expectations at all, you are likely to be seriously disappointed. And puzzled. On the face of it, the author's obsessions are odd. It's a very long book and a good part of it is taken up with minute descriptions of the characters attempts to find their way through the mazy interior of the hospital. There is also rather a lot of seemingly irrelevant characterisation - one of the volunteers tells long war stories which are quoted verbatim, and Maisie, a little girl with a heart condition, collects descriptions of disasters like the Hindenburg and retells them at great length (which at least stops her being too cute).
But this is because Willis is writing about reality and about people, and is trying actively to avoid the usual novelistic conventions that surround her subject. Ironically, this forces her to write in metaphors that resist conventional literary development. What Maisie says is almost irrelevant - it's why she's saying it, the fact that she's a sick girl who is afraid of dying. So she substitutes researching disasters for contemplation of her condition. One thing in place of another. Showing, not telling.
And ultimately, metaphors are what this book is all about. Or rather, one big metaphor which is ingeniously and subtly developed in myriad ways. It's not a cosy or comforting metaphor (Willis is no Maurice Mandrake). In fact it's utterly terrifying. But by a deft trick of plotting, Willis manages to end the novel on a hopeful note, as she unfolds an aspect of her metaphor that reveals a tender human truth.
Incidentally, Willis has been ill-served by her publishers who, as well as failing to give this novel the prominence it deserves, have saddled it with a cover that gives away a major plot feature. Buy it in plain covers if you can.
Passage - Connie Willis - Voyager 2002
* * * * *
(Another review postponed from last year. Again, apologies if anyone finds it upsetting.)
This was the final book I read in 2004, and if I were to nominate my book of the year, this would probably be it. This extraordinary novel is funny, moving, troubling, profound and highly original both in its construction and in the effects it sets out to achieve, and I won't forget it in a hurry.
It is set in a hospital and its ostensible subject is Near Death Experiences (NDEs), the hallucinatory state reported by some people who recover from coding (cardiac arrest). Actually, it's about far more than that - it's about what people experience as they approach death (a question which haunts anyone who has had to make decisions about a dying friend or relative). Its about science and how science is done. And it's about human foolishness - how we are not in control, how we confabulate and jump to irrational conclusions, and yet can discover truths and communicate them with each other.
The protagonist is a doctor, Joanna Lander, a psychologist who is interviewing patients who have had NDEs in an attempt to identify the common features. Her research is constantly thwarted by the nearest thing that the book has to a villain - Maurice Mandrake (splendid name!), an author who also interviews NDE patients but ruins them for Joanna's purposes by asking leading questions that cause them to fit their observations into a conventional religious narrative. After a classic screwball comedy of misunderstandings she teams up with Richard Wright, a doctor who is also investigating NDEs but from a neurochemical viewpoint in the hope of developing a technique to revive people who have coded. He has found a drug that creates temporary NDE-like symptoms and is looking for volunteers to try it on - Joanna can help him out by getting accurate descriptions from the test subjects of what they experienced. When all the volunteers prove unsuitable for one reason or another, Joanna volunteers to undergo the experiment herself. Her own repeated NDE experiences, though surreal and dreamlike, are naggingly familiar, and she becomes obsessed with finding out more...
The foregoing might suggest a few obvious genre bolt-holes down which the story could go. A horror story, perhaps, or a medical or psychological thriller, or a rather overlong preparation for a transfer to a fantasy world or alternate universe. Or maybe a romance (Richard is tall, blond, cute and available, as Joanna's paramedic friend Vielle points out). All I can say is that if you come to this book with any genre expectations at all, you are likely to be seriously disappointed. And puzzled. On the face of it, the author's obsessions are odd. It's a very long book and a good part of it is taken up with minute descriptions of the characters attempts to find their way through the mazy interior of the hospital. There is also rather a lot of seemingly irrelevant characterisation - one of the volunteers tells long war stories which are quoted verbatim, and Maisie, a little girl with a heart condition, collects descriptions of disasters like the Hindenburg and retells them at great length (which at least stops her being too cute).
But this is because Willis is writing about reality and about people, and is trying actively to avoid the usual novelistic conventions that surround her subject. Ironically, this forces her to write in metaphors that resist conventional literary development. What Maisie says is almost irrelevant - it's why she's saying it, the fact that she's a sick girl who is afraid of dying. So she substitutes researching disasters for contemplation of her condition. One thing in place of another. Showing, not telling.
And ultimately, metaphors are what this book is all about. Or rather, one big metaphor which is ingeniously and subtly developed in myriad ways. It's not a cosy or comforting metaphor (Willis is no Maurice Mandrake). In fact it's utterly terrifying. But by a deft trick of plotting, Willis manages to end the novel on a hopeful note, as she unfolds an aspect of her metaphor that reveals a tender human truth.
Incidentally, Willis has been ill-served by her publishers who, as well as failing to give this novel the prominence it deserves, have saddled it with a cover that gives away a major plot feature. Buy it in plain covers if you can.