Passage
Since I spent much of this week in bed sick, I had plenty of time to read between fever-dreams and bouts of unconsciousness. One day this week I read Connie Willis's Passage. The premise is interesting. Dr. Joanna Lander, a psychologist, specializes in studying near-death experiences. She teams up with a neurologist, Dr. Richard Wright (which was really distracting for me because I kept thinking of the mid-20th century African American author--this character is nothing like that Richard Wright) who has developed a way to manufacture near-death experiences (NDEs) using drugs. When their volunteer test subjects all disappear for various reasons, Joanna decides to experience an NDE herself to keep the project going.
This is where the story gets interesting, and the fact that this doesn't get started until chapter 15 (of 60 chapters), nearly 200 pages into the novel reveals one of the novel's chief flaws. The novel is long. Too long. At 780 pages, this is one of the longest novels I've read in a long while. And while it was compelling for some reason and I really didn't want to stop reading, it was a bit repetitive at the beginning and the end. Early in the book there are myriad mentions of the labyrinthine hospital complex and the fact that the hospital cafeteria is never open. And the last third of the book is in large part watching Dr. Wright and accomplices trying desperately to figure out what Joanna was trying to tell them, trying to figure out something the audience already knows. It's a little frustrating. The novel could definitely have used some editing to make it more concise as well as more approachable. (The fact that I had the time and inclination to read the book in a day doesn't mean that the average reader will be able to have this experience with the book. If I'd had to read it in installments over a longer period of time, I suspect I would have lost interest at more than one point.)
That issue aside, however, it is a good book, although I find it hard to say why, other than that the premise really did interest me and the chapter breaks were frequent enough to keep me reading into the next chapter to find out what would happen next. It's not a book about character development, or experimental or beautiful language or structure. It's a seriously plot-driven book. It wants to be a novel of ideas as well, but it doesn't quite succeed at that. It has some interesting ideas, but the plot is ultimately more central to the experience of reading Passage than the ideas are and I left the book with little of value to contemplate, aside from some confusion about how to interpret the final chapter.
Ultimately, Joanna (and eventually Richard as well) learns the purpose of the NDE. It is not a portal to "the Other Side" where you will see your family members and angels and Jesus (or whatever deity you prefer) waiting for you. It is not, as Noyes and Linden (real-life theorists) argue, "a result of the human mind's inability to comprehend its own death" (37). Nor is it a "psychological detachment from fear," as Roth (another real-life theorist) argues. Dr. Wright argues instead in the book that "There's no evolutionary advantage to making dying easier or more pleasant" (37). What Joanna eventually discovers is that the NDE is an SOS, the brain sending out signals to the rest of the body, "a last-ditch effort by the brain to jump-start the system" (744). It's "the body's version of a crash team" (744). And the NDE takes a form that will be meaningful for the individual. Like a dream, it plays on the knowledge, experiences, and values of the person having it. For Joanna, who doesn't believe in the dead relatives and Jesus version of the afterlife, her NDE takes the form of the TItanic. It is a metaphor for the experience her body is undergoing. As it dies, the TItanic is sinking. It sends out SOS messages, it sends up flares, it tries to communicate. If the messages get through in time, there is a chance. The body may jump-start itself. Some passengers may be saved. If not, it's the end.
Willis's ideas about NDEs are interesting not because I know anything about the actual science of NDEs or because she provides a real answer to this question, but because of what they reflect about her attitude toward death and about many people's attitudes toward death. The near-death experience and the way it is interpreted (since we don't seem to have an absolute answer about this yet) says something about our beliefs about death, the afterlife, and our values.
As Joanna is dying (the third section of the book is split fairly evenly between the other characters trying to figure out her final message to them about the way the NDEs work and her own experience of death), she has time to reflect in the NDE, where time is dilated and not linked to real-time. She thinks, ...even the last words of the dying were not messages at all, but only useless echoes of the living. Useless lies. "I will never leave you," they said, and then forgot everything in the dark, disintegrating water. "We will be together again," and that was the biggest lie of all. There were no fathers waiting on the shining shore. No prophets, no elders, no Angels of Light. No light at all. And they would never be together. She would never see them again, or be able to tell them where she had gone
Willis, then, is presenting a vision of life and of death that is not religious or spiritual or sentimental. You live, you do the best you can, you make a difference if you can, then you die. There is no need to sugarcoat the truth and lie about what happens after death. It is terrifying; that is why so many people cannot face it and instead depend upon images of Jesus waiting to take them into his arms, why so many people see their relatives waiting for them. The terrifying thing about death, as Willis recognizes here, is the loss of identity that accompanies it. Seeing your dead relatives waiting for you, she points out (though I can't find the precise page on which she does so), is comforting because it proves that you are still you. Someone there knows who you are.
The confusing thing for me is that although Willis makes this argument very clearly, the final chapter ends the book with a sense of hope. The final chapter opens with an epigraph from C. S. Lewis (a well-known Christian writer) on resurrection:Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be.
Opening the chapter with this quote indicates that "something better will develop," that up to this point we have only been guessing. That much is true. No one really knows what happens after death. We are guessing. But whence this focus on "something better"? At this point, the Titanic (part of Joanna's NDE) has sunk. She is dead. But the Joanna within the NDE survives, clinging to a bit of wreckage and accompanied by a small girl she has named Helen and a French bulldog. As they float there, Joanna is convinced she is about to die, but then a boat appears on the horizon. Not the Carpathia. Not the Mackay-Bennett, which was the ship sent out to pick up the frozen corpses. Instead, the ship that appears is the Yorktown, a WWII ship central to another character's stories, a WWII ship that sank. Joanna attempts to make sense of this new development: "This could be some final synapse firing, some last attempt to make sense of dying and death, some final metaphor. Or something else altogether" (780). As the boat approaches, the sky turns golden as the sun rises. The sailors are coming to rescue them. "Are you scared?" Helen asked.
[...]
"Are you?" Helen demanded.
"Yes," Joanna said. "No. Yes."
"I'm scared, too," Helen said.
Joanna put her arm around her. The sailors were shouting from the railing, waving their white hats in the air. Behind them, above the tower, the sun came out, blindingly bright, gilding the crosses and the captain.
"What if it sinks again?" Helen asked fearfully. "The Yorktown went down at MIdway."
Joanna smiled down at her, at the little bulldog, and then looked back at the Yorktown. "All ships sink sooner or later," she said, and raised her hand to wave in greeting. "But not today. Not today."
After all the emphasis Willis has placed on the loneliness and finality of death, this ray of sunshine at the end, even if only "some final synapse firing," seems misplaced. I don't know how to feel about it. Despite everything that's been said, death is okay? There is an afterlife? Or Joanna's brain is just easing the transition? Willis does not deal clearly with this hope, nor does she earn it with the rest of the novel.
Overall, despite the flaws I've pointed out, it is a good book. It's just not a great book.
This is where the story gets interesting, and the fact that this doesn't get started until chapter 15 (of 60 chapters), nearly 200 pages into the novel reveals one of the novel's chief flaws. The novel is long. Too long. At 780 pages, this is one of the longest novels I've read in a long while. And while it was compelling for some reason and I really didn't want to stop reading, it was a bit repetitive at the beginning and the end. Early in the book there are myriad mentions of the labyrinthine hospital complex and the fact that the hospital cafeteria is never open. And the last third of the book is in large part watching Dr. Wright and accomplices trying desperately to figure out what Joanna was trying to tell them, trying to figure out something the audience already knows. It's a little frustrating. The novel could definitely have used some editing to make it more concise as well as more approachable. (The fact that I had the time and inclination to read the book in a day doesn't mean that the average reader will be able to have this experience with the book. If I'd had to read it in installments over a longer period of time, I suspect I would have lost interest at more than one point.)
That issue aside, however, it is a good book, although I find it hard to say why, other than that the premise really did interest me and the chapter breaks were frequent enough to keep me reading into the next chapter to find out what would happen next. It's not a book about character development, or experimental or beautiful language or structure. It's a seriously plot-driven book. It wants to be a novel of ideas as well, but it doesn't quite succeed at that. It has some interesting ideas, but the plot is ultimately more central to the experience of reading Passage than the ideas are and I left the book with little of value to contemplate, aside from some confusion about how to interpret the final chapter.
Ultimately, Joanna (and eventually Richard as well) learns the purpose of the NDE. It is not a portal to "the Other Side" where you will see your family members and angels and Jesus (or whatever deity you prefer) waiting for you. It is not, as Noyes and Linden (real-life theorists) argue, "a result of the human mind's inability to comprehend its own death" (37). Nor is it a "psychological detachment from fear," as Roth (another real-life theorist) argues. Dr. Wright argues instead in the book that "There's no evolutionary advantage to making dying easier or more pleasant" (37). What Joanna eventually discovers is that the NDE is an SOS, the brain sending out signals to the rest of the body, "a last-ditch effort by the brain to jump-start the system" (744). It's "the body's version of a crash team" (744). And the NDE takes a form that will be meaningful for the individual. Like a dream, it plays on the knowledge, experiences, and values of the person having it. For Joanna, who doesn't believe in the dead relatives and Jesus version of the afterlife, her NDE takes the form of the TItanic. It is a metaphor for the experience her body is undergoing. As it dies, the TItanic is sinking. It sends out SOS messages, it sends up flares, it tries to communicate. If the messages get through in time, there is a chance. The body may jump-start itself. Some passengers may be saved. If not, it's the end.
Willis's ideas about NDEs are interesting not because I know anything about the actual science of NDEs or because she provides a real answer to this question, but because of what they reflect about her attitude toward death and about many people's attitudes toward death. The near-death experience and the way it is interpreted (since we don't seem to have an absolute answer about this yet) says something about our beliefs about death, the afterlife, and our values.
As Joanna is dying (the third section of the book is split fairly evenly between the other characters trying to figure out her final message to them about the way the NDEs work and her own experience of death), she has time to reflect in the NDE, where time is dilated and not linked to real-time. She thinks, ...even the last words of the dying were not messages at all, but only useless echoes of the living. Useless lies. "I will never leave you," they said, and then forgot everything in the dark, disintegrating water. "We will be together again," and that was the biggest lie of all. There were no fathers waiting on the shining shore. No prophets, no elders, no Angels of Light. No light at all. And they would never be together. She would never see them again, or be able to tell them where she had gone
Willis, then, is presenting a vision of life and of death that is not religious or spiritual or sentimental. You live, you do the best you can, you make a difference if you can, then you die. There is no need to sugarcoat the truth and lie about what happens after death. It is terrifying; that is why so many people cannot face it and instead depend upon images of Jesus waiting to take them into his arms, why so many people see their relatives waiting for them. The terrifying thing about death, as Willis recognizes here, is the loss of identity that accompanies it. Seeing your dead relatives waiting for you, she points out (though I can't find the precise page on which she does so), is comforting because it proves that you are still you. Someone there knows who you are.
The confusing thing for me is that although Willis makes this argument very clearly, the final chapter ends the book with a sense of hope. The final chapter opens with an epigraph from C. S. Lewis (a well-known Christian writer) on resurrection:Guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be.
Opening the chapter with this quote indicates that "something better will develop," that up to this point we have only been guessing. That much is true. No one really knows what happens after death. We are guessing. But whence this focus on "something better"? At this point, the Titanic (part of Joanna's NDE) has sunk. She is dead. But the Joanna within the NDE survives, clinging to a bit of wreckage and accompanied by a small girl she has named Helen and a French bulldog. As they float there, Joanna is convinced she is about to die, but then a boat appears on the horizon. Not the Carpathia. Not the Mackay-Bennett, which was the ship sent out to pick up the frozen corpses. Instead, the ship that appears is the Yorktown, a WWII ship central to another character's stories, a WWII ship that sank. Joanna attempts to make sense of this new development: "This could be some final synapse firing, some last attempt to make sense of dying and death, some final metaphor. Or something else altogether" (780). As the boat approaches, the sky turns golden as the sun rises. The sailors are coming to rescue them. "Are you scared?" Helen asked.
[...]
"Are you?" Helen demanded.
"Yes," Joanna said. "No. Yes."
"I'm scared, too," Helen said.
Joanna put her arm around her. The sailors were shouting from the railing, waving their white hats in the air. Behind them, above the tower, the sun came out, blindingly bright, gilding the crosses and the captain.
"What if it sinks again?" Helen asked fearfully. "The Yorktown went down at MIdway."
Joanna smiled down at her, at the little bulldog, and then looked back at the Yorktown. "All ships sink sooner or later," she said, and raised her hand to wave in greeting. "But not today. Not today."
After all the emphasis Willis has placed on the loneliness and finality of death, this ray of sunshine at the end, even if only "some final synapse firing," seems misplaced. I don't know how to feel about it. Despite everything that's been said, death is okay? There is an afterlife? Or Joanna's brain is just easing the transition? Willis does not deal clearly with this hope, nor does she earn it with the rest of the novel.
Overall, despite the flaws I've pointed out, it is a good book. It's just not a great book.