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More Vampires! Breaking Dawn and The Passage 9/5/2010 5:04:00 PM
I’m back to the land of the living! In my last post early August I said that I would be on and off email for the next four weeks. Well, it was definitely more off than on. It did feel weird to be totally disconnected from the electronic world, but I have come back more refreshed than ever. I spent a few days in London, followed by a few weeks in Eastern France, in a one-hundred-people village lost in a hilly area covered with green meadows and deep forests. Quite idyllic. I spent lots of time with my two nephews and a string of aunts and uncles, and other relatives and friends. Lots of time to catch up, chat, and take long walks and bike rides.
I did manage to read a few books. I’ve completed my exploration of vampire literature with Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer and The Passage by Justin Cronin, although I still have Blood Canticle by Anne Rice on my To-Read list. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not big on vampires, but then again I felt I needed to know enough about their treatment in recent literature to be able to hold a decent conversation if the need arose! I had read the first three instalments of the Twilight series and was curious to find out how Meyer had concluded the series. Verdict? I wasn’t thrilled. It’s in the same vein as the other three, with little happening, hapless characters and a simple plot. Meyer does cover the various points that I am sure her fans expected to find in the last book, i.e. Bella and Edward’s wedding, the honeymoon (meaning sex), Bella being turned into a vampire, Jacob and Bella’s relationship, and the Volturi. A new element in the story: Edward and Bella have a child. I felt that the plot was a little too predictable and that, unlike in the other books, there were a few gaping holes in the story. The ending didn’t satisfy me either – much ado about nothing. No fight. No big bang. It felt like water being poured on ashes.
Cronin’s “The Passage” was much more exciting – and much better written. Here’s a brief synopsis of the book: The US Army is leading an experiment in which they use death-row prisoners to develop a virus that could provide the key to eternal life (not a new concept, but the rest of the book is quite innovative). Something goes wrong and the prisoners turn into beasts (vampires), which reproduce quickly and almost wipe the entire world population (the US population to be more exact – little is known of the rest of the world). A six-year-old girl, who was part of the experiment, acquires everlasting life. She will play a vital role in saving mankind. The story jumps hundred years ahead when human survivors live in isolated communities, trying to stay alive. The book is the epic journey that a number of individuals, bound together in various ways, take to try to save the human world from extinction. This is not a horror story; there is no gore, and no detailed descriptions of deaths or other horrible events. This is much more a mixture of fantasy and epic. And it’s good. I enjoyed sharing the lives, hopes and despair, of a surviving colony in California. The characters are well drawn, and the plot, once you accept the premise, is well structured and thought provoking. I liked the fact that the vampires are not described in much detail – but the details that are used are excellent to get a picture of the beasts that is very scary – yet almost real. The book is cleverly built, told from various viewpoints, including excerpts from a manuscript found hundreds of years later, which (you will understand if you read the book) tells a lot about the ending, without ever mentioning it. I found this very smart. Much of the story happens in the future, but a future that is, in a way, behind us. I rushed through the first and the last two quarters of the novel. There are a few holes in the story though. Some elements are there for effect, but without clear explanation or tools to decipher them. The ending is very open and can be interpreted in many ways, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with that. With 766 pages, it is a big book, but one to enjoy. Four stars.
