Review: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Review by Elle

Publication information: Virago Press / 30 Jan 2003 / 448 pages

Where I heard about it: This was one of my set book for my Open University course this year but it’s been on my radar for a while.

Spoilers: None. ZIP. Nada. To spoil even a little would be to ruin the suspense!

Review:

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

Working as a lady’s companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers.

Not since Jane Eyre has a heroine faced such difficulty with the Other Woman.

I can confidently say that I have never once converted so many people to wanting to read a novel using nothing more than my Goodreads status updates. Furthermore, I can absolutely say that I haven’t read a single novel this year which has so completely lived up to its potential in the way that Rebecca has and, let me tell you, this year has been the year of good books so that’s really saying something.

“I do love you,” I said. “I love you dreadfully and I’ve been crying all night because I thought I should never see you again.”

When I said this, I remember he laughed and stretched his hand across the breakfast table. “Bless you for that,” he said; “one day, when you reach that exhalted age of thirty-six which you told me was your ambition, I’ll remind you of this moment. And you won’t believe me. It’s a pity you have to grow up.”

Rebecca had been on my wish list for what seemed like forever; it was one of those novels that I just never quite got around to. My interest was piqued earlier this year, however, by some intense research into JM Barrie (the author of Peter Pan for anyone not quite up on their British literary traditions) and his involvement in the du Maurier family (indeed, Daphne du Maurier called JM Barrie “Uncle Jim”). In all of the literature that I’d waded through in my quest to illuminate something real and tangible about Barrie, I kept tripping over the wan and distant figure of Daphne du Maurier, finding hint after hint of her troubled life and the way in which she achieved catharsis through her novels (something which somewhat disturbingly mirrors Barrie’s idea of catharsis). I am not, it has to be said, someone who is vastly invested in authorial intentions when I read novels – what the author intended doesn’t matter all that much after the novel and its ideas become the property of its readers – but I must confess to having a small obsession with dearest Daphne, so when Rebecca turned up on my set books list for my 20^th century literature class, I just about jumped up and down on the spot.

It would be impossible for Daphne du Maurier not to doff her cap to Charlotte Brontë in the telling of Rebecca; the intertextual links to Jane Eyre and the original tale of The Other Woman linger softly around the edges of the novel from the first page and converge like a smog on the tale as we claw ourselves nearer to the end. Readers are immediately catapulted into the quasi-confident first-person narrative – which is almost unwaveringly delivered by our disturbingly permanently-nameless narrator – and astute lovers of the nineteenth-century novels that are du Maurier’s inheritance will here find the tenacity of Jane Eyre herself becoming muddled with the naïveté of Catherine Morland, the bumbling, socially inept protagonist of Austen’s Northanger Abbey . While we’re on the subject of genre-inheritance, I think it would be equally impossible not to regard Max de Winter in his full context as allusions to Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre shadow his every word (and what steamy and dark words they are, I was in love from the first page and willing to believe anything he told me, even if that included that martians inhabited Manderley and made the tea). Du Maurier draws on the aloofness of Darcy, the wit and cheek of Rochester and the brooding violence of Heathcliff to create the menacing, gloomy figure of the Bryonic hero that our narrator so completely falls for.

What du Maurier does achieve is a glorious reinvention of the Gothic. Readers of classics like Frankenstein and Treasure Island will revel in the pervading air of menace that exists in Manderley, shadowy halls delivering bumps and squeaks, surprise servant corridors where you least expect them, rooms untouched since the last Mrs de Winter sat in them, rain coats carrying perfumed scents. Indeed, the word “Manderley” itself seems to have so firmly fixed itself in our cultural consciousness that we are able to recall it mythic surrounds as quickly as we are Pemberley and Thornfield. Lovers of the more recent works of Kate Morton which take place around mysterious locations (The House at Riverton, The Forgotten Garden) will enjoy discovering the secrets of Manderley and will probably be able to make more Beauty and the Beast allusions when it comes to an entire wing being shut up and dark.

This was a woman’s room, graceful, fragile, the room of someone who had chosen every particle of furniture with great care so that each chair, each vase, each small, infintesimal thing should bee in harmony with one another, and with her own personality. It was as though she who had arranged this room had said: “This I will have, and this, and this,” taking piece by piece from the treasures of Manderley each object that pleased her best, ignoring the second-rate, the mediocre, laying her hand with sure certain instinct only upon the best.

To say that Daphne du Maurier draws on other sources of inspiration for her novel is not, of course, to say that it is not original in its own way. Each character follows their own personal path in their search for identity and the role of women and gender expectations are just as fully explored, demolished and built up again. There is a cast of truly unforgettable supporting characters, which is an achivement in itself and something I love to see in any novel but particularly nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novels because it seems that contemporary novels have a hard time of making them seem like anything other than bit-pieces to show how good the protagonist is (also, Frank stole my heart). Rebecca is also a manifesto, a view of the ever-changing fragility and of the superficial and blatantly surface relationships particularly typical of the 1920s and, curiously, of the 2000s.

In short, Rebecca is a jewel in the crown of twentieth-century literature: it manages to deliver that which what readers crave most and that which they don’t expect, all at the same time. It is recommended for anyone who is sick of formulaic romantic fiction and wants to sit on the edge of their seat clutching their throat for the entire ride.

My top ten list just keeps getting better.

10 decadent chocolate bon-bons: The best-of-the-best.

(For more rating information see here.)

Book Babble: Kate on the Future of (e)Reading

In aftermath of news that IKEA is changing designs for a world with fewer paper books, Kate discusses the digital book revolution and why the eReader-versus-”treeware” debate is less controversial and more just silly.

The Passage Readalong: Week 4 – Chapters 19 – 22

The Passage Readalong

Week 4 – Chapters 19 – 22

And once again, it’s time for The Passage readalong! This week is Viv’s week to host, and you can find that main post here If you’re trying to catch up or wondering what exactly we’re up to, please see our guide to reading along with us, found here.

Elle’s a bit swamped with uni right now (and Kate will soon be taking that position, but more about that coming soon!), so we’ll be sticking with Kate’s thoughts this week. Elle has promised a massive thought-dump when she’s a little less bogged down, so worry not; you’ll be getting her counter-point soon enough!

Kate’s thoughts…

And abruptly, The Passage is a whole different book.

I’m not overstating the experience. Starting Part IV felt like starting an entirely different book. At first, I was frustrated, annoyed, and just – disengaged with the entire thing. It took me probably an hour, all-told, to read the first 10 or so pages; I started it several times and always opted to do other things (including homework!) rather than climb in. I’ve come to distrust Justin Cronin – said in present tense because I still don’t trust him, not after I’ve been jerked here and there into caring about characters that are only stolen from me a half-dozen pages later – and couldn’t get back into the book when it had such a hugely different tone. I had no Wolgast to pull me in, and from the looks of it, no Amy. I simply could not bring myself to care.

Until I started getting into it.

It’s hard to explain how the experience and mood of the settlement struck me. It’s a bit like if Lois Lowry’s The Giver grew up and proceeded to have a love child with George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. There’s this gritty, post-apocalyptic bleakness that is somehow combined with this larger-than-life fantastical element that I really actually came to enjoy by the end of this week’s reading. And for all of my grousing that he jerks around my emotions, Cronin is an excellent character writer. Within the first chapter I adored Alicia, Peter, and Theo, thought Michael was interesting and found Elton delightfully curious while still being strange. I connected in a way I hadn’t since Wolgast took Amy to the carnival, because I believed in these characters. I wanted them to be real people, I had aspirations for them (and theories on romantic attraction – hey, who doesn’t read a book and think about that?!) and I cared about what they were going through. The scene in the station, with Peter and Alicia on the roof and then the attack, put my heart in my throat. The library made my stomach churn and actually horrified me. The mall scene was haunting, mysterious, and brilliantly done. All told, I have to say that I –

I almost don’t have any complaints about Part IV this far.

It’s cautious optimism, though, which bring me to my overall criticism of the book as a whole. My first point, which I’ve said before and I’ll say again, is that I feel jerked around. I want to be invested in these characters and fully involved but it’s so hard when Cronin basically set up the first 250 pages of the book to ensure that every time I got attached to a character, he or she died a gruesome death! I understand, of course, that not every character can ride off into the sunset on an armored white horse, but I just feel that Cronin works too hard to keep his readers off-balance and shock them for the sake of shock. Plus, once again, there are no minor characters; everyone is so fleshed out that I kind of want to beat my head into a wall. I don’t need to know that dying Gabe (who is mentioned about once) has a mentally disabled son, that some random character has four children (complete with their names), or that Arlo and Hollis are identical except for the beard (but Sara can see the difference even if they both have beards). It’s simply too much information. And in a lot of ways, it was why Part IV was hard to get into; it was so laden with description and character information right off the bat that I didn’t have a chance to hit the “flow” of the chapters until something like 15 or 20 pages in.

My second criticism is that I’m sort of wondering what the first part of the book was for. Every composition teacher I’ve ever had, be it for fiction writing or creative non-fiction, has given me the exact same piece of advice: start in the middle. There has to be backstory, has to be exposition, and has to be something that happened before the meat of the plot. Here, it really feels like the first three parts was exposition that, instead of leaving somewhere on his computer labeled “first draft,” Cronin decided to incorporate into the actual novel. As much as I am in love with Wolgast, I have to wonder if the whole wouldn’t have been more coherent and more interesting to read if it’d started with Peter on the Watch than with Amy’s mother trying to cope. I hope that the beginning ends up synching up with the rest of the book more than it has thus far, but more than that? I hope this doesn’t sow the seeds that in Part VII, we’ll be moving on to some other era of human existence, a few thousand miles and a hundred years away from this one, and forced to learn a whole new set of characters in a whole new setting with a whole new primary conflict.

I want to believe that maybe the book has gotten marginally better, but I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

So what do you think? Part IV: Better or worse than Parts I through III? We’d love to hear in the comments! If you posted on your blog about the Readalong, please leave us a link so we can pop it on the end of this post!

The Passage Readalong: Week 3 – Chapters 12 – 18

The Passage Readalong

Week 3 – Chapters 12 – 18

Welcome to our third installment of The Passage readalong! As we’ve finished Part III, we’re back with new thoughts on the latest chapters! If you’re looking to catch up or wondering what this is all about, please see our guide to the readalong, which you can find here.

Please note: a lot happened in this section of the book, and there was absolutely no way to avoid some pretty major spoilers. If you’re not caught up, or you’re thinking about reading the book, please proceed with caution. There was literally no way to describe this section of the book or comment thoughtfully on it without some spoilers. Nature of the beast, I’m afraid!

Synopsis – Chapters 12 – 18

Chapter Twelve begins with a sickly, exhausted Sikes arriving at Wolgast’s cell within the compound with a purpose: Amy is in the compound as well, and they suspect she’s dying. Wolgast finds Amy in isolation, in a coma, and is told that he can only see her if he wears a special suit that will prevent him from contracting the virus. He goes in unprotected, itself. Meanwhile, Grey has started to lose hours, unable to recount them, and spends most of his time feeling ill and off-center. He begins to notice changes in the people he works with, both in their physiques and their demeanors. Another change has come in the form of Anthony Carter, who is now not really Anthony at all, and who manages to kill one of the men who cares for him, drinking his blood. Richards, who in his own right is as haunted as Grey and the others, suspects Anthony is the meanest of the lot. Richards also gets the disturbing news that a young black woman has arrived looking for Wolgast.

The black woman is in fact Sister Lacey, whose trip to the compound is recounted in Chapter Thirteen. Following the voice of God in her head, she walked, hitchhiked, and stowed-away to Colorado, eventually making it into the facility by hiding in the back of an Army-issue supply truck. Richards, who isn’t sure how to deal with her, goes to release Doyle from his cell, only to find that Doyle somehow knew she was coming. Before Doyle and Lacey are reunited, however, Grey – guided once again by the voice of Zero in the back of his mind – walks into Zero’s chamber and allows Zero to kill him and also, to escape.

The security breach picks up steam in Chapter Fourteen, when Richards discovers that all of the subjects have escaped and the soldiers throughout the facility are panicking rather than following protocol. One destroys the elevator and then power is lost, trapping Wolgast and a barely-conscious Amy in her isolation room. Dr. Lear comes in to rescue them, helping them to maneuver past the dead and dying and into an air vent, but ultimately stays behind to ensure Amy’s safety. Wolgast manages to get Amy through the ducts, up a ladder, and into the main area of the facility. He’s reunited both with Doyle and Lacey, where Doyle provides him keys to a get-away car. Despite the fact they exit together, both Doyle and Lacey stay in order to distract the subjects.

Chapter Fifteen begins Part III and chronicles Wolgast and Amy’s escape from Colorado to Oregon. They make their way to a camp Wolgast spent summers at as a boy, and as they settle in, Wolgast remembers meeting and falling in love with his ex-wife, Lila. He thinks of her often as they settle in at the camp, as well as detailing the changes in Amy: she no longer can tolerate the feel of the sun on her skin or in her eyes, she sleeps during the day but stays up at night, and she seems to know things she otherwise shouldn’t. But they can’t stay at the camp without supplies, forcing Wolgast to go down to a small store. There, he discovers that the virus and its carriers has spread from the incident at the compound to cover a large portion of the Midwest, putting the country into panic. The man at the store wars Wolgast that the virus is even worse than mentioned in the newspaper.

Wolgast and Amy continue to stay at the camp throughout Chapter Sixteen, as well, though the situation continually becomes more dire. Forest fires ravage the area and nearly destroy the camp; Chicago falls to those with the virus and California secedes from the union; the man who runs the general store is found dead. As they settle in for the winter in Chapter Seventeen, though, it appears that they may be safe from the woes of the rest of the world. A man arrives from nearby Washington after having been attacked by someone with the virus, confirming Wolgast’s fears that they weren’t as safe as they thought. Though he shoots the man to protect them, the damage has been done; soon, a nearby city is “cleansed” by a nuclear blast (as rumors’d said was happening to other infected areas) and blows out the window in the front of the lodge where Amy and Wolgast are staying. Though Amy is unharmed, Wolgast’s leg is pierced by a large piece of glass. Despite his very best efforts, Wolgast is unable to mend the wound properly and it gets infected. Amy takes care of him as best she can, but when he wakes up one night with the realization that he’s dying, he discovers that the trees are full of those with the virus – and Amy is gone.

Chapter Eighteen is entirely an excerpt from the diaries of a woman named Ida Jaxon, called “Auntie,” recounting her experiences during the evacuation of Philidelphia during some point we can only assume was contemporaneous to Wolgast’s last stand. In it, Ida recalls the restrictive lives of her family as the city was placed under martial law during the run-up to the “jumps” arriving, as well as her father’s decision to place her on a FEMA train that was leaving the city for safer places. She is eventually delivered to the newly-seceded California, where she is reunited with her cousin Terrence and proceeds to settle into a FEMA facility. She mentions things we’ve not heard of before, such as First Families, Watchers, the Chous, and the Time Before, but doesn’t elaborate. The end of the chapter marks the end of Part III.

Kate’s thoughts…

I can officially say, with meaning, that this book has turned into a disappointment.

I mentioned this to Elle on the phone this morning, and I think it bears repeating: Cronin’s habit of killing people off arbitrarily and without any real warning is now a full-out gimmick. I cannot even describe to you in words how frustrating it is that he builds up literally dozens of characters with all these meaningful details only to tear them down pages or chapters later with absolutely no remorse. Deaths in literature should mean something. They should make your heart climb into your throat, should make you want to weep, should stand on your belly and choke you, but in The Passage, they just feel – empty. Throughout the compound being destroyed and dozens of established characters all dying, I had absolutely no emotional connection to the experience. I didn’t care if they got out alive or not, because I knew some would and some wouldn’t and that the decision of who fit in which category was completely arbitrary. Because there’s absolutely no way to tell which characters matter, you either are forced to become emotionally connected to all of them – or none. And sadly, I think or none is much more likely.

I think that’s my biggest beef with this book, all things considered: there’s no emotional connection.  I don’t really care about any of the characters, or what happens to them; there’s no impetuous for me to keep reading. I tend to forget the book even exists until Sunday or Monday, where I read my five chapters, put it down, and then forget about it again. There’s not enough there to compel me to keep going, to light a fire where I am desperate to follow Amy to the next step of her adventure, and honestly? Killing Wolgast has stripped me of the only character I actually liked, which is just going to make it harder for me to feel anything about this book. Instead of connecting with it like a novel, I connect with it like I do my casebook for class, reading what I have to and then being finished when I turn the last page of the assignment.

The camping chapters in this section, though, were probably my favorite, I think in part because of Wolgast and part simply because it was a break from the disjointed, sharply segmented point-of-view jumping which’d taken place up until then. For the first time, it felt like a discreet narrative, and it made me really want to just take that part of the story and turn it into a novella. Man rescues little girl, protects her from the crazy world outside his control, man dies. Instead, those chapters were over too quickly, and we were back to another disjointed segment, one I’m not even sure belonged there. And I am back to not caring, because now the only emotional tie I had to the book is gone.

It’s funny, because the American edition starts with no fewer than four pages of quotes that just sing absolute praises of The Passage. I think nearly every newspaper on the planet is quoted somewhere at the beginning – and I can’t figure out why. I can’t figure out what in this book is so amazing that the world’s newspapers are writing odes to it. I’m a third of the way into it. You’d think I’d have some idea by now.

Instead, I’m just continually let down and disappointed, and frankly, very tired of it. I’m glad it’s a fast read, but mostly, I just want it to be done. And that is just sad.

Elle’s thoughts…

Elle is feeling a bit under the weather right now, but I’m authorized to tell you her thoughts will be coming very soon!

So what do you think? Did you enjoy the first few chapters? We’d love to hear in the comments! If you posted on your blog about the Readalong, please leave us a link so we can pop it on the end of this post!

Melvin Burgess: Kill All Enemies Blog Tour

Melvin Burgess:

Kill All Enemies Blog Tour

A few months ago, we linked you to a discussion from Melvin Burgess about his newest novel Kill All Enemies (you can find the post here if you missed it) and today we’re delighted to be participating in the blog tour for its release! Kill All Enemies just got a resoundingly good review in The Guardian which you can find here.

For our stop on the tour, we’re offering one book for giveaway. To win a copy of Kill All Enemies, please leave a comment on this post.

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Guest Post by Melvin Burgess
Bad Kids

We’re all aware of the recent riots, that brought so much opprobrium and loathing down on the heads of young people. How about you – did you have any sympathy for them? Now? What about the kids who disrupt lessons in the classroom, depriving other kids – maybe your child – of the chance to work hard, get an education and get on? After all, that’s surely what we want for all children; the chance to get on. Why should we have any sympathy for anyone, of any age, who stops that happening?

Bad kids. Who wants them?

I remember the story of one lad at my high school, a big lad – a huge lad, actually – who was a terrible bully. He did something bad – I’ve no idea what – and got sent to borstal. Some time later,

our headmaster came into assembly in a furious state. Apparently this lad had escaped from Borstal and been chased down by the dogs.

“Hunted down with dogs, like an animal!” he raged.

Wow! What a bad kid that was! You wouldn’t want him in the same class as your child, no way! We all lived in fear of him at school. When I look back now, he fills me up with wonder and wishes. I wonder what he did and how he did it. I wonder how he ended up there. I wonder what happened to him after? I wish he’d been different – for his sake, and for the sake of all his many victims.

Most of all, I wish I could sit down with him now and ask him to tell me his story. Not necessarily the story of that night he was hunted down with dogs. I’d love to hear it, but it’s not always the story of the event itself that tells you the most. I’d just like to get at the things that stick in his brain from his childhood. All these years later, he’d have a view on it. He’d have worked it all out into a story of some kind. It wouldn’t necessarily provide an explanation, or a theory; it wouldn’t be any kind of a reason an excuse. I just know this; that for him, it would sum up the things that happened in his life.

The stories that stick in our heads from certain seminal parts of our lives aren’t just memories. They’re myths – our myths. They express events and what they mean to us in narrative form. It’s what people do all the time. More to the point, it’s what novelists do as well.

There’s a lot of kids like that one – thousands, millions, perhaps, in most large towns and cities around our country. All of them have stories lodged in their heads and hearts, stories that describe, illustrate, illuminate, and clarify their lives. Somehow, amid all the clamour and theorising and policy and blame, those stories don’t get heard very often. In other words, these are young people who have no voice in society – no story, no myth. I think if we could, we would wipe them as thoroughly as we once tried to wipe out the myths and legends of aboriginal people the world over.

Of course, those youngsters do have stories to tell, and they love to tell them. All you have to do is ask. When you do ask, you get the whole thing there in front of you – voice, experience, people, character, situation – story.

Well, that was the idea of Kill All Enemies. I wanted to hear the stories of young people from deprived communities and try to get their voices down on paper. I went into PRU’s to talk to excluded students, and through youth workers to meet young people who’d had some really difficult backgrounds. I told them I wanted to write a book and would they tell me their stories. They responded with great generosity and pride, and told me all about what had happened to them.

Many of those young people were pretty dodgy. Most of them had been excluded form school at some time; all of them had been in trouble – some of them in serious trouble. They didn’t do well at school and most teachers would have been delighted to have them out of the class. They’re poor, disruptive and some, at certain times in their lives, had been actively dangerous. Many of them, I’ve no doubt, would have been out on the streets gleefully putting a foot through a shop window if they had half chance. And yet, so often, the stories they told me revealed a very different picture to the one you get from reading the papers. In fact, many of those kids were heroes. Real life, genuine heroes, who had been doing their very best for the people were important to them, the people who they loved and who loved them. The fact that it didn’t always leave them a lot of time for school was something anyone who knew their stories could relate to at once.

Kill All Enemies is a novel, of course, and there’s no pretence that the people in it are real, or that everything that happened in the book happened in real life. But behind each character there is a real person who set me off and inspired me to try and understand their life, or something like it, through fiction. I hope I did a good job – I’d hate any of them to feel I let them down.

Over the next few days on this little blog tour, I’m going to talk about the real people behind the stories, how I dramatised them and tried to give them a voice that they would recognise and that people would want to read. I hope you’ll want to follow it. So thanks to Bobby and Matt and Jamie and Callum, and to Deeta and Karen and Jen and Rob and Lisa and Joelle and all the rest of you. I hope you think it was worth your time!

- Melvin Burgess

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For the next step on the tour, please head over to Wondrous Reads.

For more information on Melvin and his other novels, head on over to his website. For a taster of his other work, please see our review of Junk which you can find here.

The Passage Readalong: Week 2 – Chapters 6 – 11

The Passage Readalong

Week 2 – Chapters 6 – 11

Welcome to our second dealing of The Passage thoughts. We’re late getting our thoughts up on this one (in fact, we only have Kate’s!) but don’t worry, next week we’ll be right back on the ball.

For the main post this week, please go here. For all posts so far, please go here.

Kate’s thoughts…

This past week was a very busy one for me, such that I worried I wouldn’t be able to get to The Passage at all. Of course, part of this is that I judge how much I’m enjoying a book on my urgency about it (if I’m loving it, I will find the half-hour to read; if I’m feeling torn, I will spend that half-hour playing SimCity or watching television), and so, as Sunday night arrived and I’d read very little, I took it as confirmation of the flaws I talked about last week. The disjointed nature of the book, and the way it jumped around, was starting to grate on me; the dozens of unanswered questions and microscopic red herrings were forcing me away from The Passage and onto other activities.

Then, Sunday night, I sat down to read.

And within less than 24 hours, I’d finished the 80-odd pages to bring me through Chapter 11 – and then read a good portion of Chapter 12, too, because I couldn’t stop.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still of two minds about The Passage. I feel like the book is a bit schizophrenic in its approach in that every paragraph on every page is stuffed with meaning. Every character, even the minor ones, burst with personality, which was charming at first but now is just frustrating; I don’t need to know every detail about the girl Doyle is flirting with or the woman at the zoo with the baby, thank you. I think I know why Cronin is doing it, attempting to make the reader care about every individual in the book on his or her merits so, when something happens, it’s all the more shocking!, but it over-fills the pages. The book would feel like a much tighter read if some of that detailing were removed. Instead, it feels like Charles Dickens and Dan Brown had a supernatural love child and named him Justin Cronin.

In the same way, the plot is starting to irk on me. The atmosphere is still perfect – the facility is incredibly creepy, the “subjects” have honestly made my stomach twist and my heart pound a few different times, and seeing the slow changes through some of the characters feels like watching a really well-executed movie – but there are just too many holes. Everything goes unexplained while hundreds of little hints are dropped here, there, and everywhere, and it feels incredibly disjointed to me. I feel like I’m supposed to feel a bit like Wolgast – just someone doing his job, dragged into this insane situation without any idea what it actually is, and slowly coming to the realization that something very wrong is happening – but Cronin fails to execute that point of view properly. It feels like a flawed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in that I, the reader, am meant to be just as confused and clueless as the characters in the book, but there isn’t enough there for me to feel fully included, either. The best comparison I can draw is walking into a room where a friend is watching a movie and trying to figure out what is going on. Actually, it’s more like walking into a room where a friend is watching the second movie in a trilogy and trying to figure out what was going on.

That said, there are elements I absolutely love. Amy is interesting and the more we see of her, the more I want to know. The scene with her at the zoo made my belly twist (but was then promptly forgotten; I wish the threads were better followed through); her relationship with Wolgast is absolutely perfect. I love the theme of lying/hiding the truth that is running throughout and the ease with which people deceive each other. Wolgast is possibly my favorite character and the scene with he and Amy at the fun fair really pulled at my heartstrings. The scenes Subject Zero and his moments with Grey made me grateful I was reading in the well-lit library. I want to know what the actual virus is and what really is happening in the facility. I definitely want to know more.

I just wish the knowing would happen more quickly. Instead, I’m starting to get the feeling that The Passage is about 200 pages longer than it needs to be – a bit, again, like Dickens.