Passage

Dr. Joanna Lander is working at Mercy General Hospital. She is not a medical doctor, however, but a cognitive psychologist, someone who investigates how people acquire, store, and process information to understand complex behaviors. To that end, she is focused on NDE’s, or Near Death Experiences, reported by hospital patients who code but are then revived.

She struggles to get to these patients before Maurice Mandrake does. Mandrake, the author of the best-selling book “The Light at the End of the Tunnel,” is also chasing after NDE patients. He seeks material for another lucrative book “proving” the existence of an afterlife - along with guardian angels, out-of-body levitation, entering a tunnel with a bright light at the end show more of it, messages to the living, and other common elements of NDEs generally reflecting specific inculcated religious beliefs.

As the story opens, a new doctor interested in NDE’s has just joined Mercy General, Dr. Richard Wright. Dr. Wright is focused on ascertaining the neurochemical events associated with NDEs, believing that the NDE is a side effect of those events. His work involved artificially inducing NDE’s with a hallucinogen while a patient’s brain activity was monitored by chemical tracers. If he could map the electrochemical activity in an NDE, perhaps he could understand what caused them and how they worked.

Richard and Joanna began to work together, and in addition, Joanna decided to volunteer as one of Richard’s subjects. But what Joanna saw during each NDE took place on the Titanic. She knows that is a clue to what the NDE is, but doesn’t know what it means. She searches for clues from her high school English literature teacher, Mr. Briarley, who used to talk about the Titanic to his class. If she could only find Mr. Briarley, and be reminded of what he said to her about the book, perhaps she could help Richard solve the conundrum of NDEs.

Evaluation: I love the books by Connie Willis. They are notable for riffing on several themes. One is of course the inclusion of actual historical elements that add interest to the plots. Another is that her characters experience myriad communication difficulties: people not listening to one another, speaking over each other’s words, imposing meaning based on preconceptions and different perceptions of reality, missed communications, such as not answering your phone or pager or listening to your answering machine, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens so much in her books, and it can be so annoying, you want to grab the character and say “keep quiet and listen!” But real life is just like that.

I also like her use of children as major characters, and her understanding of how they speak and act.

Fourth is a focus on the contrast between true and false religiosity - sincere piety versus hypocrisy with all of its self-righteousness. She shows “true” piety as other-oriented, humble, and even marked by a willingness to give up your life to help someone else.

Above it, it seems to me, she knows how to tell a poignant, memorable story. She is adept at helping you feel the characters’ pain or angst or happiness as well as share in their love for each other. And in this book, there is the story of the Titanic, which is still moving and riveting no matter how many times you hear it. show less

I can't write this review without including one obvious fact, so I will start with that: This book is too long. I love Willis' writing style, but this book a has a bunch of unneeded repetition that detracted from the overall impact. I do think that some of the repetition was needed; it helps the reader feel the frustration that the main characters get from running into the same roadblocks and the same questions over and over. But we didn't need all of it. This could have been reduced by 200+ pages easily and still been a deep, impactful book. (My paperback copy is 780 pages.)

Now... about the story. The concept is neat. It's about near death experiences (NDEs) and some of the people trying to make sense of them. On one side we have the show more rather cliched Dr. Mandrake who says everything is proof that angels and Heaven exist even while he manipulates his favorite patients into remembering what he wants them to remember. On the other side, we have Dr. Wright, who is convinced he can find a chemical explanation for NDEs. And in the middle, but very much on the side of science, we have Dr. Lander who is trying to understand NDEs, and eventually asks Dr. Wright to include her as one of his study patients in an effort to get a better understanding. Throw in all kinds of side characters—from Dr. Lander's BFF ER nurse, to a girl who needs a heart transplant and spends her time in the hospital researching disasters, to a WWII vet who just wants someone to listen, to a young woman who is caring for her aging uncle with Alzheimer's—and the hospital where most of the action takes place really comes alive.

While I still think the page count could have been reduced by a third and been a stronger book for it, I did like where the plot went and the various discoveries the characters made along the way—both about science and about themselves. I liked the conceit of starting each chapter with the last words of various famous people. I liked the characters, some of them a lot. I like Willis' writing style, and the masterful way she weaves together the plot details along with seemingly irrelevant things that turn out to be foreshadowing. I think this is a good book that just needed more trimming down & editing to be a great book. But honestly? It really needs that trimming. show less

The science in this work of science fiction is neurochemistry; researchers in a US hospital are exploring the mechanics of near-death experiences (NDEs) and find themselves having to battle psychics, people trying too hard to be helpful, an eccentric hospital ground plan best described as "a maze of twisty passages, all alike", and the urge to research reported experiences to establish their verisimilitude and in the process contaminating the subject.

At times, I swung between irritation and fascination with this novel. Ms. Willis was getting into full stride with her favourite device, the 'running around in a complex setting and trying to contact people who themselves are running around in the same setting and so are never in one place show more long enough to be found' device. We first saw it in 'Doomsday Book', there was a bit of it in 'To say nothing of the dog', and she really went completely overboard on it in 'Blackout'/'All Clear', to the detriment of those novels. In this book, though, it works; my last visit to a hospital resulted in my being unable to find my way out of it, so I readily sympathised with the characters. Some of the running around began to get a bit tiresome and I found myself resigning myself to a descent into irritation, but for the most part it actually all came good and there was a point to it all.

As the central characters stumble towards a solution to the research problems, Ms. Willis cleverly manipulates the language of the text to suggest people groping towards a solution that is just out of reach, sensed dimly but which refuses to come into sharp focus. This is very well done indeed. The cast of characters is engaging; if they seem slightly stereotyped, they are nonetheless believable stereotypes. It does not, however, turn into a hospital romance. And the research into NDEs starts out as pure science in a tone of scepticism, pitched against purveyors of psychic bunkum; but in a major twist about two-thirds of the way through, everything becomes very serious - indeed, literally a matter of Life and Death.

For a book weighing in at the thick end of 800 pages, this was nonetheless a fairly straightforward read, though it pulls no punches in the neurochemistry department. The theory and explanation put forward in the novel does not appear to match any current research thinking on the subject, but seems as plausible as any other (if you do not accept spiritual explanations). The setting is very end of century; characters have pagers and watch VHS tapes, but this really isn't a problem.

In all, an engrossing and worthwhile read, but not in any way lightweight. show less

Liked: Interesting idea. Good ear for dialogue. Vividly conveys the absurdities of working in a hospital, and the kind of compassionate impatience good doctors develop toward difficult people. Attention given to practical things, like research design and where to find snack food. Intense atmosphere of gathering dread in the first half of the book before there's any clue as to what's going on.

Disliked: Lots and lots of wheel-spinning while waiting for characters to figure out what the reader already knows. POV characters often pausing for 2 lines of internal monologue to clarify why they feel guilty about something, when this is really obvious (Willis did this a lot in Doomsday Book too, but it didn't bother me as much there because the show more momentum of that book was so strong). An amount of transparent sentimentality that's a stretch even for me (I'm a huge softie, but I think if you have a dead person in the bardo rescue the phantom of a cute puppy dog, that's fine, and if you want them to also meet a sad-eyed orphan child, that's fine too, but I'm not sure the sad-eyed child must then adopt the puppy dog). show less

Dr. Joanna Lander is studying near-death experiences, or NDEs. Dr. Richard Wright has discovered a way to chemically replicate what the brain goes through chemically during an NDE. Richard asks Joanna to confirm that what his volunteers are experiencing are indeed NDEs, but when funding and volunteers become scarce, Joanna goes under herself. I found this book extremely difficult to take, but in a good way: it's extremely suspenseful and the characters are likeable and sometimes infuriatingly realistic. At first I wondered if this lengthy novel could have been shortened, but the various stories and details shared become important eventually, and add even more to the realism. Though at times emotionally harrowing, this was one seriously show more excellent story. A little dark in places - it is largely about death, after all - but it never loses all hope. And now I need to go pick up everything else Willis has ever written. show less

I cannot love this novel more. You will most likely wind up staying up all night to find out how it ends, just like I did. I don't think it's healthy to hold your breath like I did while caught up in the final chapters, as well.

This is a brilliant, deeply engaging, philosophical piece of neuroscience-fiction that manages to ponder the Big Questions while maintaining an easy conversational style, numerous moments of both tears and laughter, and characters you will love so much you wish they would come to life.

About half-way through this novel, it does something an author should not do, through, and then continues, unabashed. I adore it.
5 stars, and highly recommended.

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Connie Willis excels at meshing humorously satirical commentary on interpersonal relationships with insights into the human condition that are so true they almost hurt. In 'Passage,' Joanna Lander is a researcher at a large hospital investigating near-death experiences. Her work is complicated by the difficulty of interviewing people who are near-death, but especially by the new-age charlatan who insists on being considered her colleague, Dr. Mandrake. Much of Joanna's time consists of trying to avoid Mandrake, but then she meets Dr. Wright, who has found a way, he believes, to simulate the near-death experience using drugs. Intrigued, Joanna joins him on his project - but a comedy of errors results in the project having not nearly show more enough volunteers, and Joanna herself decides to go under, and experience the NDE. Gradually, the mood changes from comedic to an increasingly frantic, obsessive, chaotic experience, as Joanna believes she is discovering truths about the NDE - but strangely, her experiences all seem to be tied to the Titanic disaster. People can't go to the sinking Titanic when they die - can they? She has the elusive feeling that she is missing some vital connection, always just on the edge of her consciousness. show less