Passage (Willis novel)

Passage

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	Connie Willis
Language	English
Genre	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Bantam Books
Publication date	2001
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	594 pp
ISBN	0-553-11124-8
OCLC	45558909
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3573.I45652 P3 2001

Passage is a science fiction novel by Connie Willis, published in 2001. The novel won the Locus Award for Best Novel in 2002, was shortlisted for the Nebula Award in 2001, and received nominations for the Hugo, Campbell, and Clarke Awards in 2002.

Passage follows the efforts of Joanna Lander, a research psychologist, to understand the phenomenon of near-death experiences (or NDEs) by interviewing hospital patients after they are revived following clinical death. Her work with Dr. Richard Wright, a neurologist who has discovered a way to chemically induce an artificial NDE and conduct an "RIPT" brain scan during the experience, leads her to the discovery of the biological purpose of NDEs. Through Lander's work, Dr. Wright is able to develop a medicine that brings patients back from clinical death.

The novel contains enlightening discussions of various disasters, including the RMS Titanic, the Hartford circus fire, the Hindenburg disaster, the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, the Boston Molasses Disaster, and, almost as prominently as the Titanic, the sinking of the USS Yorktown. (Willis has written extensively in several novels about events in World War II.)

Background

Connie Willis's inspiration for Passage came in part from her mother's death, when Willis was 12. Willis felt frustrated that relatives and friends tried to comfort her with platitudes, so she wanted to write a novel that dealt with death honestly and could help people understand the process of death and mourning.

The character of Maurice Mandrake was inspired by Willis's anger at psychics and mediums who take advantage of vulnerable people.

Plot summary

Joanna Lander, a clinical psychologist, interviews patients who have had near-death experiences; she aspires to understand what occurs between the times when a person dies and then is revived. She becomes frustrated when many of her patients cannot or will not give accurate information about their experiences. She realizes that the scientific evidence is contaminated by the influence of Dr. Maurice Mandrake, a persistent charlatan "researcher" who publishes books about near-death experiences and convinces patients that their experiences happened exactly the way his books describe NDEs, such as learning cosmic secrets from angels.

They remembered it all for him, leaving their body and entering the tunnel and meeting Jesus, remembered the Light and the Life Review and the Meetings with Deceased Loved Ones. Conveniently forgetting the sights and sounds that didn't fit and conjuring up ones that did. And completely obliterating whatever had actually occurred.

Dr. Richard Wright, who has discovered a way to induce artificial NDEs in patients and monitor their brain activity throughout, contacts Joanna and asks if she will join his research study and interview his patients after he induces NDEs. She agrees. They are intellectually compatible and have a budding, mutual romantic interest.

Mandrake considers them competitors, and he sabotages their efforts by approaching revived patients before they can. Mandrake's method is to ask mellifluous leading questions of the patients and thereby taint their self-reported NDEs; this causes Joanna and Richard hardship in finding volunteers for the study.

Lacking enough volunteers for proper methodology, Joanna elects to undergo the process. She gets the help of Tish, a good nurse, to help with the prep; Tish is happy to, because she thinks Richard Wright is "cute" and can flirt with him while Joanna is "under".

Joanna finds herself in a dark passage that, through further NDEs, she realizes is part of a dream-like version of the RMS Titanic, on which she encounters passengers of the real Titanic as well as someone symbolically near death, a high school teacher of hers, Mr. Briarley. Between NDE sessions, Joanna struggles to figure out why she sees the Titanic, and she eventually tracks down Pat Briarley, her English teacher from high school, who spoke often of the Titanic in class. Joanna discovers that Mr. Briarley, once a highly animated and keen teacher, now suffers from Alzheimer's disease. This is crushing to Joanna, who was certain that Mr. Briarley could give her "the key" to clarify why she sees the Titanic. However, Mr. Briarley's niece, Kit, promises to help.

Joanna also consults with Maisie Nellis, a girl who suffers from a heart defect, "V-fib", because Maisie, a born rationalist, gives only accurate information about her NDEs. Maisie also gives Joanna important information about the Titanic.

Through talking with her patients and undergoing more NDEs, Lander realizes that the near-death experience is a mechanism that the brain uses to create a scenario symbolic of what the brain attempts to do when it is dying: find a suitable neural pathway by which to send a message that can "jump start" the rest of the body back into life. If the person having a real near-death experience can metaphorically send a message to someone appearing in the NDE, she learns (specifically, from a revived coma patient), the person will awaken and survive.

Before she can tell Richard Wright about her discovery, she goes to visit Nurse Vielle in the Emergency Room and is stabbed by a man deranged by a drug called "rogue". Before losing consciousness, she manages to say a few words to Vielle, trying to communicate her discovery about NDEs. She finds herself in the Titanic again and races against dream-like obstacles to escape and awaken.

Richard Wright, on hearing that Joanna is dying or dead, enters an artificial NDE, thinking that he will find himself in the Titanic and be able to rescue Lander. He instead finds himself at the offices of the White Star Line, where the names of the victims of the Titanic disaster are being read to the public - he is too late to "save" Joanna. He awakens many hours later, and Tish, crying, tells him that Joanna has died.

As Richard and Joanna's friends struggle with her death, Joanna herself remains in the Titanic until it sinks, and her memories of life fade away.

Richard realizes that Joanna was trying to tell him something before she died (they had discussed the importance of last words), and he tracks down all the people she spoke to before she was stabbed. He learns what Joanna discovered. Before she could reach him, Joanna had told, of all people, Mandrake, "The NDE is a message. It's an SOS. It's a call for help." Grasping her dying message, Richard develops a chemical treatment that he believes can revive a patient. Maisie suffers V-fib and dies, but Richard successfully uses his experimental treatment on her, and she later receives a heart transplant; she will live.

Within her final NDE, on an imaginary ship, Joanna finds herself adrift on the water, with some memories still intact and accompanied by a child and a dog which Maisie has told her about from other disasters. As the novel ends, they watch the approach of a ship repeatedly mentioned by Ed Wojakowski.

Characters

• Joanna Lander - A clinical psychologist who attempts to learn the true nature of near-death experiences through interviews with patients. She is kind, often absent-minded, but as dogged as Sherlock Holmes when she is after a clue to her investigations. Joanna, unmarried and childless, loves Maisie, calling her "one of the world's great kids."
• Richard Wright - A neurologist who wants to discover a way to revive patients after clinical death. Described as blond and cute, he is considered aloof by Tish, who wants to date him, and a great catch by Vielle, who wants Joanna to date him. He is a nurturer: Joanna never thinks to bring lunch for herself, although an ongoing joke in the novel is that the hospital Cafeteria is never open; Richard often feeds Joanna the oranges, crackers, candy bars and sodas in his coat pockets which he brought from home.
• Vielle Howard - A nurse who works in the ER, and Joanna Lander's best friend. They regularly get together to watch movies. Vielle has a crush on a police officer who looks like Denzel Washington; but she is pursued by a morgue employee.
• Maurice Mandrake - A charlatan researcher who has interviewed patients who have had NDEs, convincing them that their experiences were exactly as he describes in his best-selling books.
• Ed Wojakowski - An elderly man who volunteers for the NDE study and claims to be a World War II veteran in the United States Navy, but is known to stretch the truth and fabricate stories. After many meandering and irrelevant stories, avoiding what he has actually experienced in an NDE, he tells Joanna after a direct question that his NDE appeared to be aboard a ship. She assumes it is the Titanic.
• Maisie Nellis - A girl about nine years old suffering from cardiomyopathy and occasional ventricular fibrillation and atrial fibrillation; often in the hospital, she is put on the list for a heart transplant. She has NDEs and is a friend of Joanna. She is obsessed with famous disasters, including the Hartford circus fire (which becomes the setting of her final NDE). Maisie infects Joanna with her obsession, so that Lander's last NDE includes people who died in that fire.
• Pat Briarley - Joanna's English teacher in high school who spoke often of the events surrounding the Titanic, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease.
• Kit Gardiner - Pat Briarley's niece, who has become her uncle's caregiver, and who becomes good friends with Joanna, offering to do research for her among Mr. Briarley's many books.

Style

Willis includes elements of madcap comedy in the style and form of Passage, and links different events thematically in order to foreshadow later events.

The novel celebrates metaphor, the very idea of which gives Joanna the understanding of how the NDE works to help the dying brain, rather than to ease it into death.

References to pop culture

Willis has the characters discuss a great many movies, some of which have indirect or obvious bearing on the novel's themes. They include Coma, Fight Club, Final Destination, Flatliners, Harold and Maude, and Peter Pan, as well as The Twilight Zone and The X-Files.

Joanna frequently talks about the Titanic movie; she, Vielle, Pat and Kit Briarley, and others share her dislike of it because of the changes to historical fact. Joanna (obviously representing Connie Willis), complains

about Lightoller and Murdoch. And Loraine Allison, she thought. She remembered ranting, "Why didn't they tell the stories of the real people who died on the Titanic, like John Jacob Astor and Lorraine Allison?... She was six years old and the only first class child to die, and her story's a lot more interesting than dopey Jack and Rose's!"

Reception

SciFi.com describes Passage as "an emotionally exhausting trip" that is ultimately "a rewarding experience." Laura Miller, writing for Salon, says that "its construction is a marvel of ingenuity and — what's even more remarkable, given the wizardry of Willis' storytelling — its intellectual honesty is impeccable... You won't find the beautiful sentences of more-celebrated 'novelists of ideas' here, though the ideas themselves are far better, more daring and more original, than those chewed over by most literary heavyweights. The dialogue can sound a trifle canned, the minor characters feel a mite thin (not that many novels of ideas don't share these flaws, too), which explains in part why Passage seems to hover between genre and genius. Given how rare a searching intelligence like Willis' is among today’s novelists, does it really matter?"

The SF Site review judged that the novel "starts slowly, and it's too long. Willis' trademark habit of making some set of frustrating everyday-life details a recurring motif or running joke (in this case, the difficulty of navigating the hospital corridors, plus the never-open cafeteria) is over-extended here..."; conversely, reviewer Steven Wu felt that "Part One of the book is masterful, with several chilling scenes, a compelling mystery, and a doozy of a cliffhanger ending. But then, only a third of the way through the book, things begin slowing down."

The A.V. Club's reviewer said, "There's certainly nothing comforting about Passage, which steeps its characters in death of all kinds—swift and sudden, prolonged and painful. Willis' satirical flair originally has Landry [sic] and Wright running around like The Three Stooges, juggling impossible schedules in an impossible environment and careening amidst exaggeratedly colorful characters in every chapter. A mid-book twist, however, takes the story into darker and more memorable territory, helping turn Passage into a complex, finely crafted, haunting story that makes the light at the end of the tunnel impossible to take lightly."

Publication history

• First hardcover edition, 2001: Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-11124-8.
• First paperback edition, 2002: Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-58051-5.

External links

• Passage at Worlds Without End