Justin Cronin has deservedly hit the best-seller list with “The Passage,” one of the summer’s big books. The first volume in a planned trilogy, the story is an epic journey that begins with the creation of a predator race — virals — and illustrates the subsequent unraveling of society. After the stage is set in the novel’s introductory section, there is a brief touchdown in the year 2 A.V. (after virus), but the bulk of the novel is launched in 92 A.V., in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
Cronin began building the story in 2005 with his daughter, then 8 years old, as she rode her bike beside him while he went for a run. Cronin, passing through Denver on his book tour, said the novel was intended to be fun. “First I was having a good time with my kid, and then I was going to have a good time with the book,” he said.
A writing exercise Cronin used with his students inspired some of the father-daughter conversations. “I show (the students) how to make decisions, to show them how the story-making instinct operates,” he said. The trick is setting a few basic guidelines and trying them out in a safe environment. When out with his daughter, he said, “We had no pen, no paper, no recorder — I was running, she was on her bike. We were kind of batting (the story) back and forth; I was using it to teach her a little. She’s a good writer and a great reader. And a great conversationalist.”
The resulting work is a departure from Cronin’s previous novels. Both “The Summer Guest” and the award-winning “Mary and O’Neil” are the type of work one expects from a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop turned English professor: literary, nicely constructed and lovely, but not the stuff of best-sellerdom.
“The Passage” stands at a remove from that more literary comfort zone. Several considerations pushed Cronin away from the familiar path. He said he didn’t have to support himself with writing, which freed him to try anything that interested him. He also had nothing to lose if the new path didn’t work: “The stakes were exactly zero,” he said.
The strongest motivating force, though, seems to be a thoughtful understanding of what telling a story can be.
“When I undertook this, I’d had a few conversations with my wife about the question of plot and the question of story and the idea that there were these artificial constraints placed on writers, that you had to be one or the other. . . . I didn’t like it. Not because I was in a category that didn’t fit me but because I felt there was an incomplete menu of what I could do or wanted to do as a writer. And if I just kept doing the same thing, ultimately I would have to keep doing the same thing. . . . I decided to just jump the rails to see what would happen.”
Central to the narrative are the virals, predators who bear some resemblance to vampires. They are far from the charismatic creations of Bram Stoker, Anne Rice or Stephenie Meyers, but they cannot tolerate light, have a voracious appetite for blood and are seemingly immortal.
Some would cast Cronin’s work as one deliberately positioned to take advantage of the current popularity of novels with vampire characters. Cronin said that chronology doesn’t work.
No one had heard of “Twilight” in the fall of 2005, when he and his daughter started their shared workouts. “I was operating off completely different templates, things that I had enjoyed, mostly popular-culture things. When this came up, it was just a collision of a lot of stuff inside of me, my kid making a dare, me wanting to have more fun with whatever it is I wrote next.
“If you backdate this whole thing, when I sold it in 2007, I’d been working on it at that time, solidly, for a couple of years. ‘Twilight’ and its millions of spinoffs, which are essentially aimed at a young female audience, has never mussed a hair on my head.”
And, as he pointed out, he’s not much of a calculating personality: “Choosing writing as a career, just by itself, is a measure of not being a calculating person. You can make more money doing just about anything else, if you do it at all well, and if you go and read my first two books, there’s not a lot of calculation going on there either,” he said.
While in Denver he spent time researching locations that will figure in the next volume. Cherry Creek appears in “The Passage” as the home of Special Agent Wolgast and his now-estranged wife, Lila. Downtown Denver is off the radar in the first book, but “In the second book, you see what happened to Denver,” he said. “It’s important to the second book.”
He likes Denver as a location because, he said, “it feels like a place where there are several things going on at once, both culturally and geographically, either California or the West. It’s an interesting mix of the two things.”
Though Denver doesn’t figure much in “The Passage,” the Western Slope is a significant setting. Cronin said he first chose California, the location that anchored his post-apocalyptic settlement. From there, he said, “I needed a journey of comprehensible distance from California. I needed a change of topography and weather. . . . Colorado was perfect.”
Add to that the feeling that, “when you’re in Colorado . . . you feel sheltered and hidden away. The mountains in Colorado are very good for that. It seemed like the perfect place for a top-secret installation.”
“The Passage” isn’t a novel with an overt message, and Cronin said, “You don’t want to preach. The minute you do that, the book dies.” But, he said, “I kept coming back to one thing again and again, the meaning of children. A bunch of human beings get together and use science to try to achieve immortality. They don’t realize that we’re already immortal because we have kids. The future that I will not live to see is the one my children will live in. That’s my immortality. And I shouldn’t try to mortgage theirs for my benefit.”
“The Passage” is a reflection of Cronin’s fascination with the possibilities of the post-apocalyptic world. “I grew up on this stuff. … I grew up on a steady diet of everything from ‘On the Beach’ to ‘Planet of the Apes.’ I was a ‘Planet of the Apes’-obsessed kid. That scene where Charlton Heston sees the Statue of Liberty? It was like the biggest moment for me as a child.”
The wait will seem endless, though probably only a couple of years, for the next installment in the trilogy. Of the upcoming works, Cronin said, “I want each of them to be strong novels, not necessarily requiring reading the other two. . . . I want them each to be strong stories.
“In each, you go back to Year Zero, for some period of time, to see something that you either glanced at or did not see the first time, something you did not know was as important as it was, that resets the terms for the ongoing story of my main cast of characters: Peter, Sara, Alicia, Michael, Theo, Maus and, of course, Amy.”
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial.
FICTION
The Passage
by Justin Cronin, $27
