The Passage by Justin Cronin; or Are Books too Long These Days?

So, I picked up a book in an airport a couple of weeks ago – The Passage by Justin Cronin. It sounded pretty cool – how can you go wrong with a vampire apocalypse? The book also has several excellent ideas – using the popular ‘vampire virus’ motif it included defence experimentation on death row prisoners going horribly wrong. It also had an excellent cut from the ‘virus origin and outbreak’ moment to 100 years in the future AND some ‘documents’ from even further in the future.

All of these are excellent science fiction tropes and some brought to mind the fantastic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jnr, which jumps to various points in time following nuclear holocaust and includes an excellent plot device where some monks worship an old twentieth century shopping list.

However, The Passage has one major flaw. It is unnecessarily long. The cool bits of the plot – in particular the notion that all people infected with the virus are linked to one of the original 13 ‘vampires’ and operate as a sort of hive mind – are overshadowed by unnecessarily detailed back stories for unimportant characters and overlong descriptions of pretty much everything. The back story thing I find particularly irritating. Cronin is a pretty decent writer, but I hate this idea that in order to give a character depth you need (a) to know a lot of unimportant details about their history and (b) have access to their internal monologue for a really long period of time. I think that you can convey a lot about a character with a few well placed observations and thoughts.

I long for the days when publishers forced page limits on writers. I love my science fiction under 300 pages. Two of my all time favourites are Phillip K Dick and M John Harrison and they write fantastic short books. I want to point out here that I am not an enemy of long books. I love Moby Dick, the Brothers Karamazov and I have read all of In Search of Lost Time. I just think that where books are more on the adventure/advancing the plot end of fiction you can get bogged down in unnecessary description and explanation. Fantasy epics suffer most from this – why do you need to describe someone walking up a flight of stairs for 5 pages? No, you want to know what happens when they get to the top. Books don’t need to happen in real time. And they don’t need to be epicly long to be epic. It is the themes and the breadth of your vision that makes a novel epic.

Anyway, The Passage was pretty interesting, and I felt it was a shame that it wasn’t edited better. I love genre fiction, but I think this long book trend if producing a lot of dross which is hiding the gold.