jethrien

Title: Passage
Author: Connie Willis
Genre: I really have no idea. Contemporary literary fiction? Fantasy? Science fiction?
Thingummies: 4.5

Synopsis: Joanna Lander is a medical researcher who studies near death experiences. When Richard Wright asks her to join him in his project to map brain functions to pharmacologically induced NDEs, it seems like the perfect extension of her own work. But when she undergoes the procedure herself, she finds herself pulled into something much larger than she had anticipated.

Thoughts: This book is a mind-fuck that had the potential for far more mind-fuckery than actually happens in the end, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.

I don't want to discuss a lot of the twists here in too much detail, since much of the suspense (and this is a seriously suspenseful book) comes from not quite knowing what's going on. Also, about three quarters of the way through, you get hit by something you're really not going to suspect that changes everything. But there's a bunch to discuss in general terms.

So much of this book takes place in Joanna's mind, while she's under the influence of some pretty powerful drugs. It's not in any way incoherent--this isn't one of those annoyingly "experimental" books where the author decides that s/he is too sophisticated for grammar or cause and effect. But because of the effects on Joanna's temporal lobe, her search acquires an urgency that borders on irrational. She's in a heightened state of excitement for much of the book, far more than would be reasonable for a normal person. I found it extremely compelling--despite the fact this is not a murder mystery or spy novel, it races along from one clue to the next. Joanna is constantly reevaluating the nature of the things she's experiencing. Her near-death experiences are hardly angels and life reviews, but she's not sure what they are. Are they windows into her unconscious? Memories? Symbolism? Tapping into the universal unconsciousness? Paranormal events? Random chemical impulses her brain is flailing around trying to interpret? Just about every possible scenario is presented and seriously considered at one point or another. The explanation Willis settles on I think satisfactorily fulfills the clues given, and the somewhat ambiguous closing chapter leaves some other doors open in an interesting way.

I also found a lot of the characters suitably engaging. Many of the minor characters are fascinating in their own right--Joanna's brilliant high school English teacher who's trying to hide a secret, the child Maisie dying of heart failure and obsessed with disasters, Joanna's saucy best friend. Some of Joanna's scorn for the paranormal is well explained towards the end of the book--she never addresses it herself, but you later begin to understand some of her motivations.

On the other hand--some of Joanna's actions really do seem absurd when you take a step back and look at them objectively. I think this is well explained, but I could see how some readers might get put off. Also, while many of the supporting cast are well drawn, they have a tendency to be a bit one-dimensional and rather repetitive. They remind me a bit of Dickens characters, in an entirely non-florid Victorian way--memorable and interesting, but without much depth.

Given the amount of confusion thrown up deliberately over the course of the novel as to what the NDEs actually are, I thought that the final resolution, while completely logical, was not quite as daring as some of the places I thought she might be going. Some spoilers below. Read the book first. Really.

Did you read it yet? No? Shame on you.

SPOILERY SPOILERS I WARNED YOU. I found myself wondering if perhaps Joanna was dead from the very beginning. The repetition of several of the characters--from the repeated WWII stories to the repeated insistence on angels and Life Reviews--and the dreamlike nature of the hospital itself--the fact you can never get from one place to another directly, the fact that the cafeteria is never open--made me think that the entire novel seemed like the hallucination, possibly of a dying brain. It would also account for the increasing urgency of Joanna's quest, which doesn't quite make sense when you think about it too hard. I am happy with the actual ending. I like that the explanation is not particularly science-fictiony and that it actually seems like it has a reasonable chance of being the real explanation of why our brains do this. But. Part of me wishes that she'd gone for the full Twilight Zone/The Sixth Sense/Memento "none of this is actually what you thought it meant" treatment of completely flipping us over near the end. It seems a waste, and makes some of those repeated elements seem just like bad writing instead.

Despite this, I still really liked this book. I was thinking and wondering all the way through. Perhaps it wasn't as bold as I'd wanted, but it was still plenty bold and creative. Very well done.