Passage

The point of no return occurs in reading when I get to the point where I can’t put the book down. I don’t want to do anything else; I just want to read, read, read until I find out what happens. After that point, all reading is gobbling. I don’t read thoughtfully or carefully. I just read as fast as I can.

In reading Connie Willis’s Passage, I reached the point of no return very early, which made the fact the book is 780 pages slightly problematic. I wanted to gobble the rest, but the book was so long, I often felt frustrated with the pace. I do think potentially some of the muddling around in the first part might have been reduced, but the muddling also made the action realistic. (Spoiler alert: this review discusses the mysteries unraveled over the course of the novel.)

Passage tells the story of researchers seeking a scientific explanation for near-death experiences (NDEs). Dr. Joanna Lander attempts to collect and compare details from memories of individuals who have almost died about their experiences. She is opposed by Mr. Mandrake, a popular author of books about the near-death experience that offer comfort in a particular pattern of steps that confirm a spiritual afterlife. If Joanna reaches the subject after Mr. Mandrake, the subject is ruined for scientific study because Mr. Mandrake has injected his own steps into the subjects’ narratives, and the subjects no longer accurately remember their own experiences.

Joanna joins forces with Dr. Richard Wright, who is attempting to map brain chemicals associated with NDEs. He has discovered a drug that allows subjects’ brains to mimic NDEs, so he puts subjects under the influence of this drug and photographs their brain activity. As the subjects available for his study rapidly decrease, Joanna herself becomes a subject.

Because her NDEs occur onboard the Titanic, Joanna begins to imagine that maybe everyone’s occurs in that setting. Her probing of her own experience sends her back to her high-school English teacher, a one-time Titanic enthusiast who has Alzheimer’s, and puts her in contact with “Coma Carl,” who eventually emerges from his coma to provide key information about the NDE--his NDEs take place in a cowboys-and-Indians setting.  Joanna also makes friends with young Maisie who needs a heart transplant and is routinely admitted to the hospital in the midst of an NDE. Just as Joanna reaches understanding about NDEs--that they are SOS messages the brain sends to the body seeking assistance--she herself is killed in an emergency room accident.

The remainder of the novel finds Joanna permanently in her Titanic reality with her friends in the living world scrambling to understand her last words (“Tell Richard it’s SOS” [588]) in order to find a scientific response to NDEs that will save Maisie’s life. Ultimately, Maisie is saved through Richard’s ability to use Joanna’s discovery for medical purposes, and the book ends with the image of Joanna in a lifeboat being picked up by another ship that was part of a tall tale told by one of her research subjects. While we know Joanna is really and truly dead, it’s comforting that after the terror of the big ship sinking and the sensation of drowning associated with the brain’s SOS role, the brain ultimately generates images of solace.

Passage is an important story about the last passage between life and death or whatever comes next. The word “passage” also plays in interesting ways against the idea of passage on a ship and the hallway passage that often figures in near-death narratives. The detail of the scientific world in which the characters live is depicted effectively, and the connection between NDEs and literature as another kind of message is satisfying to me as a scholar of literature.

A key component to Joanna’s discovery is based not only on her English teacher’s passion for the Titanic but also on his passion for literature. She remembers him standing in front of her class smacking a book on his desk and repeating “’Literature is a message!’” (543) As she realizes what the brain is doing physically as death approaches--attempting to send messages to other parts of the body to avert death--Joanna connects this key sentence with the images of telegraph distress messages from the Titanic with the need communicate through the Pony Express and smoke signals in Coma Carl’s NDE.

Stories are vitally important. They are the way our brain shapes reality, and they are the way we communicate that reality to ourselves and others. Perhaps the poignancy is that we don’t live to tell our stories forever. We have only our brief moment on Earth, and then our stories must be carried forward by others. And our stories, like the messages occurring in NDEs, are about survival. They alert others that death is approaching so that they can fight it and live to appreciate another day. 

Image Source: Passage Cover. amazon.com. Web 27 May 2012. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Connie+Willis+Passage

Work Cited: Willis, Connie. Passage. New York: Bantam, 2001. Print.