The Passage versus The Passage

I used to think re-reading books was a literary sin. (Which is not a sulphur-and-brimstone sin, more a Fahrenheit 451 sin, the underworld hazy with the ashes of not just words, but something more physical and dependable than even the pages themselves.)  It was Against the Rules (or My Rules, or just my rules - I'm not sure). How could you waste time re-reading a book when there are so many unread books waiting (patiently) (and not so patiently) for you to breathe life into their characters and give them refuge in your memory?

But then I re-read The People's Act of Love, because I needed to; I started re-reading the Discworld series in order, because I like symmetry (I'm on book 29 of 41) and because they're dependable - even after 20 or 30 years, the satire still rings true and the characters are endearing or despicable for the same reasons; I re-read Special Topics in Calamity Physics because I wanted to re-read Night Film, but I couldn't re-read Pessl's second book without reading her first (right?); and now I am re-reading The Passage trilogy, not because I need to but because I want to.

My housemate and I watched the TV adaptation of The Passage in two sessions of five episodes each (each episode is 40 minutes). (Disclaimer: He slept through the last two.) He hasn't read the books and doesn't plan to - he reads fantasy almost exclusively and doesn't plan to meander into apocalyptic horror. However, he is a fan of vampire-esque movies and series and the associated 'lore' - think everything from Dracula to Buffy to Blade to Dawn of the Dead. This is important because the author (Justin Cronin) plays fast and loose with the vampire mythology. Meaning he scraps most of it.

So I am re-reading the books to see if what I loved about the books was originally in the books or if it was something I imposed onto them. Whether I wanted to love the books so much that I did the author the (dis)service of mutating his characters. I have now finished the first book (The Passage) and am taking a break before I begin the second book, The Twelve.

In the meantime, the news has come out that the network will not be making a second season of The Passage. Because of this, my housemate doesn't plan to watch the final episodes of the series that he slept through - smartly, he doesn't want to invest in something that doesn't have an obvious reward. I wish I had had that attitude before watching the third season of Twin Peaks or of Westworld. Yes, I'm still bitter.

Returning to my point (I seem to have developed a compass since last I addressed you, dear reader), while reading The Passage, I highlighted every description of the vampires to see whether I had conjured up a private vision of Cronin's vampires (which, if you read back in my posts, I found terrifying - and I find few things in this world terrifying, apart from human nature) or whether the special effects department had just gotten it wrong, whether for logistical or financial reasons. Thank you, Kindle, because it means all my highlights are now stored all in one place.

In the TV series, the vampires (the ones we see in the bunker, at least) are your standard-issue vampires: pale, reddish-amberish eyes, veins throbbing in their faces, but otherwise clothes-wearing humans. They can also pass for human, as Shauna Babcock does at the end of the season, and they have the Dracula-esque ability to seduce human beings and get them to do their bidding. Perhaps the reason for these choices is that they're a kind of shorthand - the viewer knows what kind of nasty we're looking at, leaving us mental space to focus on other elements of the plot.

One of the 'virals'

Because the vampires in the book are not standard issue. To start with, they're called 'virals', rather than 'vampires', because (obviously) the transformation is caused by a virus unearthed from a South American forest (where else?). These vampires are humanoid, but more muscled than humans and 'coiled', always ready to strike; they glow and their eyes are orange; they don't speak - they make ticking sounds; they have claws rather than hands, fangs rather than teeth; "the facial features seemed to have been buffed away, smoothed"; and their bodies are completely hairless. They hunt in 'pods' of three each, controlled by a hierarchy of twelve 'original' telepathic vampires (who do retain the Dracula-esque ability to appear in the thoughts of both humans and virals).

As I type the characteristics of these virals out, I realise how difficult it would have been to try to translate that onto the silver screen. Glowing vampires? They sound like a lumpy child's toy. But I still wish the special effects team had tried. By not trying, they were creating just another vampire TV show and we really don't need another one of those.

The relationship between the orphaned Amy Bellafonte and FBI agent Brad Wolgast sustains the first season

In addition to breathing life into a flogged-to-death genre, Cronin's strength as a writer is telling people's stories. The TV series gets this right in its casting and portrayal of the relationship between Federal Agent Bard Wolgast and a young girl named Amy Bellafonte. Wolgast is tasked with retrieving Bellafonte and bringing her to the facility where they can test the virus on her (you know, the one that turns everyone into vampires; yeah, that one) because she's an orphan and no one will miss her (I'm pretty sure there are laws against this, but ok). The writers tasked with translating the story for the silver screen fudge the details a bit, but the developing, sincere father-daughter relationship between the two characters makes this whole season watchable.

Thinking about this has made me realise how long Cronin's books are, how tedious they become in places, and how much better he is at telling people's stories than at navigating plot. The relationship between Wolgast and Bellafonte being one example. Another example is the story of Anthony Carter, who becomes one of the original virals and whose story binds the books together. The Passage alone is 760 pages long and it's only the first of three books. It covers the beginning of the outbreak, a time jump of 100 years, and a group of character's journey halfway across America, which could easily have been portioned out into two books. I'd ask: "What's left to tell?" except that I've already read the other two books, so I know the answer.

I am conflicted that there's no second season of The Passage. It would have picked up 100 years in the future (so, halfway through the first book) at a small outpost community that has lost all contact with the outside world (which, from its perspective and in typical American fashion, may no longer exist). The trailer depicts Amy as a kind of post-apocalyptic warrior princess, rather than a girl trying to survive the apocalypse, which is how she's depicted in the books and which I suppose is less appealing. If another network picks up this series, here's my compromise: I'll let you get away with warrior Amy (as opposed to survivor Amy) if I get my glowing, smooth, coiled, ticking virals.

The Last Policeman

I was not drawn to the book by the title, clearly. The title puts me in mind of an I am Legend-Rick Grimes-Deadwood mash-up. The apocalyptic surviver/cowboy thing has been done - although not to death. Those who have watched the entire Space Odyssey and can still talk about it without PTS breakdowns call the detective story, cowboy epic and science-fiction culture siblings. It makes sense, really. Yes, really. Trap activated and now you shall listen to my theories even though I have only watched five minutes of Space Odyssey before genuinely wanting to inflict physical harm upon myself.

Five minutes of my life I lost: Space Odyssey

Then again, if I were an expert, I wouldn't be putting all this down on a blog for fickle readers. Yes, again. That's you.

The Last Policeman is a detective novel. The mystery is staid: a 'hanger' has been found dead in a McDonald's bathroom and our intrepid detective believes he was murdered. The evidence being a black belt. Oh you're waiting for more? There is none. Justifiably, his colleagues think he is young and overzealous and way too committed to the whole justice thing (they have a point).

Did you notice it? The tide of silver-grey herrings? A 'hanger' is a suicide by noose. Why would one have slang for types of suicide? (I have been drawing this one out.)

An asteroid is flaming through space aimed like a stone in a slingshot slung by Hercules for Earth. And everyone is offing themselves - hanging being a popular method. (Not smart, peeps. Like, at all. It is incredibly difficult to successfully hang yourself, for reasons I shall not explore.) When the novel begins, the asteroid (sentimentally named Maia) is seven months away and 103% on course to hit Earth.

Now, I am not against a natural disaster wiping out the destructive toddler that is the human race. In fact, if I were somehow given the choice, I would choose to resurrect the dinosaurs. Partly because I have always wanted to see a dinosaur, from a secure hiding place obviously. This reminds me of the meme that if human beings had to fight for survival against the dinosaurs, the egg-laying creatures would win.

I also never understand the reactions to the apocalypse. You know we aren't immortal, right? As someone once said, we are pretty much hamburger meat. We make it until we don't. And there are lots of places on Earth where the apocalypse is pretty much every day. "Kill the cockroaches", Russian gulags and Ebola being good examples.

But while we're - I'm - discussing this, our unconscious delusions of immortality counter our death drives, like the self-correcting nervous system and Gaia. Freud said that we have to believe we are immortal in order to face our mortality and lots of psychologists whose names I don't know agree that the popularity of horror movies and apocalyptic fiction is in seeing someone else die so we can feel relief at still being alive and reinforce the idea that we are immortal.

True as Bob.

Ok, so by the time Maia gets here, she won't have many people to irradiate, and if she doesn't, there won't be anyone to say 'I told you' to. But believe it or not, some really sadistic people are still doing their jobs, including this very naive detective (I actually think he has a mild form of autism or Asberger's). Well, not doing their jobs, which is why they don't believe - or care about - the murder. Perhaps this is how he deals with his imminent demise: by obsessing over someone else's death. Oh Freud, you could write a trilogy of books about this.

 As the narrator repeatedly reminds us, the fallible scientists slid down a slide of probability until they reached the mud of almost certainly (because never say never - or just anything unequivocal. Always leave room for retraction). Our socially stilted detective seems stuck on this, probably because he likes a long shot. Which is a criterion of a good but definitely not romantic hero. These heroes are perpetually - or almost perpetually - dissatisfied.

Think of the many John Wayne or Clint Eastward characters (let's be honest, they are all just one guy with different ponchos). To be a cowboy, the hero needs to be isolated from society, even ostracised, with some trauma in his past that he assumes some guilt for. He is self-reliant in his isolation and eternally awkward in society. He is cruel, but he shows that humanity is cruel. The cowboy always faces the march of civilisation and the extinction of his little corner of desert. He is the last outpost of the old ways, in which people have one-on-one relationships with the environment. Dang society. Where is that asteroid when you need it?

Sigourney Weaver kicking some gross alien ass

Now consider Sigourney Weaver's character in Alien 2. She travelled through time when she travelled through space in the wake of blowing up a really horrid, slimy flock of flies.  Her daughter may as well be dead because she is old and crabby. No one believes her about the flies so they think she is a murderer - an insane one. She is lost in this new world and stuck in the one before having to kill things. In the end, she displays some epic gunpower (she straps two guns together - why has no one ever thought of this?!) in an epic fight wearing a robot suit. Cowboy much?

Back to the apocalypse (to my mind, facing those fracking aliens would be far worse than an instantaneous death). In I am Legend (the book), Robert Neville is all of these things, except he really is utterly alone. You could argue the zombies are a metaphor for society, being a much better catalyst than sheep, but you could also argue that without a society as backdrop, he cannot be a hero. Neville is not your Will Smith martyr; he can only be selfish to survive.

Hank Palace is definitely isolated: he uses boxes as furniture, his sister is a drug addict, and his colleagues are waiting for the day the penny drops and he realises the world is already disaster. One trait I didn't mention: honour. These men all have a code of honour (which is not justice. And I am ok with that). In Detective Palace's case, his code is logic and rules and that takes the form of justice when we meet him. He reads every amendment to the laws (now coming in and heavy), views everyone as equals (except the criminals), and writes down every clue in a blue notebook so he can put them together.

He seems to be in some denial about Maia. I will leave you to figure that one out, because you need something to do other than read blogs.

The asteroid, like bad guys, aliens and zombies is a reminder and fear of society's fallibility. The inevitability of its destruction. And perhaps the isolation that comes of knowing this. Of being unable to stop knowing this. We are attracted to these stories to roll around in their foreignness and convince ourselves they cannot happen. Except I always wonder at this fear. My degree (let's milk it for the tiny ounce of value it has) taught me that 'civilisation' is a fantasy, as is any sort of social Darwinism (I am thinking of technological Darwinism here). Change is as constant as death.

I would prefer to be murdered by an asteroid though.

There's more! I have mislead you twice about this. The detective genre. Cowboy much? One or two people deep in a conspiracy theory who pursue the 'truth' even when faced with physical harm. Look, they yell, way to loudly in a dark warehouse while they are being hunted. Society is fraught with red herrings, but we have found the truth. The world has order, friends! Phew. Joke's on you, buddy, but let's take the win. In an impressive flip, in the end they are welcomed into society, having found a friend or the love of his life or just acceptance. 'Told ya so,' he thinks and sometimes actually yells.

Society is not unequivocally screwed. Not as long as this hero(ine) brings order to the world. Like the movie named whatchamacallit, you do something good for a person, who does good, who does good. But this isn't Carthage and so our land is not about to be sown with salt and we aren't about to be taken slave. Society just is because we are and we are mortal. Good breeds good, but trauma begets trauma.

I seem to be playing both sides of the fence here. But look! There is no fence. (An asteroid took it out after a dinosaur stomped on it.) These works of the imagination conjur up our worst fears, which are part of being human and therefore inevitable, and then sings us a lullaby about our own agency. We can save ourselves, they say. Even in the face of the apocalypse, we can still make meaning of a mystery. And therefore we are immortal. Or something. Maybe just immune to death for the immediate future.

The War of the Worlds

I know you have heard this story before, but every good piece of writing should lay out its premise in an attempt at inclusivity, no matter how so-so. Back when various countries felt that wars that targeted the world they too inhabited made sense (yes, I know, now they just call their forces the UN and their weapons sanctions) and when the radio (a transistor-type thing with an aerial) was a key source of information, not just top-20 music shows and public-interest debates...

I ran out of space. No one is going to read a 20-line introduction. Assuming you read this five-line one.

Orson Welles, author of the book and the radio play

A radio drama broadcast of War of the Worlds caused widespread panic (this was also when Britain and the US were the only worthwhile parts of the world, before Britain kindly withdrew from countries like Africa - sorry, continents - all continents look the same). War of the Worlds being an invasion of Earth (only the important parts) by Martians whose intelligence ranks off the MENSA charts. Not that there were was time to check, but one can only assume.

Again, I ran out of space.

The drama was an abridged version of Orson Welles' novel (even then we had remakes and probably complained that the narration was not as we had imagined), a blatant critique of war and the desperate flailings of human beings to save themselves, updated to time and place. Unfortunately, the scenario was a little too realistic: the play included a weather report, the music and conversations of a dance hall (like a club slash hoe-down with ginger beer) interrupted by the report of an astronomer, followed by news broadcast about the touch-down of a meteorite.

While Curiosity happily pokes holes into Mars (I don't mention the Japanese attempt to sweep up intergalactic dust because I doubt they want that #epicfail mentioned), in this 1930s version we don't have a chance because Cyclops slash snake things wiggle their way out of the meteor and begin firing at anything that moves (thus destroying a lot of the land they hope to inhabit, double #epicfail). And so on and so on.

The actors and sound effects are so good that people believed that Earth was being attacked by sophisticated unanthropomorphic beings and it was every man, woman and child for themselves. The story was then picked up by another broadcaster - which, of course, according to the two-source rule means the story is legit. Apparently, people legged it out of the city, their favourite donkey, wife and cutlery set in tow. Pregnant women went into premature labour. Ostensibly because of the fright. The mind boggles.

This story took way longer to tell than I thought. If you had heard it before, I hope you had the sense to scan, in which case, YOU CAN START READING AGAIN HERE. If not, sorry for you.

Facetiousness aside (in arm's reach because I will need it again), people had just been through a war of epic proportions (hence why it was called a 'world' war) and the Great Depression, and a second war was brewing. Governments already had access to atomic bombs, which they would shortly drop on Japan. That is crazier than believing in an alien invasion, from my perspective.

Hats off to Orson Welles for creating a critique of war so realistic it created panic (although perhaps he should have peppered it with disclaimers like 'this is only a critique; all resemblance to people or nations is intended, but only in so far as they are the weakest link in the survival of humanity'). Unfortunately, the wrong people listened.

Assuming that your only knowledge is this story and the Tom Cruise version, please reset said knowledge now.

The book is thin, more of a novella, and usually sold together with The Invisible Man and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They all derive from the same time period and are loosely considered fantasy. I read it a few years ago but I have the memory of a coffee filter (by which I mean it contains coffee grounds). But (from what I do or don't remember) it is more different to the movie you know than even the two versions of World War Z.

In some ways I felt 'underwhelmed' by the book (since 10 Things I Hate About You this is now a valid word), because it had none of the action we have come to expect since Star Wars (4-6, to clarify). The basics of the book match up with the display of Tom Cruise's machismo, but the main character is an astronomer who plays a much more important and intellectual role - the explanations for what is happening being more important than the shooting at special effects. There is none of the thundering intrusion that sparks off alleged machismo, although there are many thundering explosions and crashing buildings. More important than all this is the sense of helplessness (i.e. negative machismo) the characters fall deeper and deeper into as they realise that one of humanity's usual tactics work - even an atom bomb (we resort to this quickly).

Spoiler alert: it is Mother Nature that triumphs. Now, I am no great fan of casting processes as thinking feeling entities, but in this instance even I got goosebumps from the sense that the world is far greater than us - that even intelligent beings are subject to the law of survival. The more we prod at Mother, the more we discover there are processes beyond our imagining happening under our noses. Literally. We act like a runny nose is the harbinger of doom, but scientists keep discovering new bacteria we couldn't function without. And isn't it (facetiousness buried) amazing that our bodies are so finely attuned to this 'other world', too?

A week ago, I watched the first movie adaptation from the 1950s. I confess I didn't expect much - I was really just boosting my movie cred. I watched it after Terminator II - don't judge - that series of movies is a seething mass of debates about what qualifies as life, what cost are you prepared to incur in search of greatness... Mind running away; trip mind with rope.

The movie begins with a short narrative, in this booming voice that might convince me of anything, even that politicians don't hand over their hearts at the first session of Parliament. The scene is a town that our astronomer hero happens to be visiting. (What a coincidence in a world of coincidences.) One night a meteor crashes into the national park nearby. Nonplussed, some police and other officials trudge out to look, thinking they might start a theme park around it (not a joke).

But our scientist is suspicious because he can work out how fast a meteor of that size should have been travelling in his head and works out that it should have made more of a mess. However, he is equally oblivious to the danger. At the site, he meets the heroine, who kicks ass. She lectures at a nearby university but smoothly switches roles to wartime nurse when needed, and near the end organises their retreat and even drives the bus to safety. Ok, she breaks down into an hysterical mess sometimes, but us women, y'know, just can't avoid having normal emotions.

Out comes Cyclops, who starts setting fire to the things that move, so the army does the same. Well, tries to. Mostly they set fire to inanimate things like trees. Unlike us modern viewers, no one is prepared for the force field that protects Cyclops and his siblings so it takes them a while to catch on. Long enough to waste an atomic bomb. In the meantime, Cyclops' extended siblings have touched down all over the world (except the country - I mean continent - of Africa) and are destroying cities en masse.

People flee the city, at the behest of civil authorities, because the alien can't tell you're moving if you're parked among fields of vegetables, preferably corn, right? Because, if I moved into a place with fleas, I would only exterminate the spots I meant to sit in. (The others I would train into a flea circus.) Anyway, as every apocalyptic fiction writer drills home, we are a species of survivors, where surviving means bullying everyone who has something you want. Survival of the fittest, right? The ones who don't bully, pray, because then life and death is out of their hands.

(What would I do, since I'm so glib? Find a way to hide right under their noses, preferably in a group because my chances of dying are less. Sorry, I can't help it. I would think. And more people means more thinking. I think. So I would double-back to the parts of the city they'd destroyed and find shelter underground, preferably with smart people. In this case, the best thing to do would be to wait them out.)

The scientist also does a clever thing: he chops off an eye and analyses it. (I couldn't do that, because I didn't even understand his description of how it worked or why his girlfriend shows up differently on the scan.) Anyway, then they are attacked (by human bullies), they find a church (which unfortunately is attacked - hide underground, I tell you. Or in a tree) and then the alien buggers did. Just drop out of the sky. Not one of them could adapt fast enough to survive our bacteria and so are overcome. (Knowing humans and our survival ranking, at least one of us would have made it, busters.)

Then comes the bit about Mother Nature (an entity that is really a coincidental process). I have goosebumps thinking about it. About how we are blithely stomping around, discovering something whose evolution we played absolutely no part in, not realising how indebted we are to our ecosystem.

Yerp, here are our heroine and hero, with an alien eyeball

What I enjoyed about the movie though (what bumped it up past the recent one and perhaps past the book - shock horror) was the focus on the people and not the action. I find this often with older movies. Part of this is the casting (who could ever match the charisma of Humphrey Bogart or Natalie Wood?) The movie stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. Barry plays our scientist as ever so slightly arrogant, witty and ultimately open-hearted. Robinson is enthusiastic but not embarrassingly so, level headed and open-hearted.

They fall for each other quickly (partly because there isn't my time to take it slowly and also because they are, remember, open-hearted) but he is oblivious to her break with stereotype because he's not the sort to be vaguely aware of stereotypes. I am not one for sentimentalism, you may remember. I don't like epigrams unless they are funny because I can't resist finding a logical frame to them. (There usually isn't one.) Then everyone thinks I'm overthinking it, but really, I think everyone is underthinking it.

But the scene where he has tried to leave town but is beaten up as people hijack his car, and then realises the same thing may have happened to her, is touching. He follows the trail she would have taken, probably reenacting what has just happened to him and could have happened to her over and over in his head. He acts within his nature, with bravery that does not require him to beat up people in his way, even when they try to beat him, or with one manly hand destroy alien ship after ship and the other while clutching a catatonic woman to his chest.

When he finds his love in a church, there is a crowd between them and the two of them do the required swimming against the current to get each other thing. Apologising to people as they do. They hug and then just stand there leaning against each other for a while. An alien ship is crashing into a stained glass window and they just stand there, happy to be with each other. Nor is there any smooching. Ok, maybe one, but more a kiss than a smooch.

Ok, so maybe I am sentimental. I just usually keep the emotion safe and warm within a blanket of facetiousness.

So, My Point? My Point is obviously that the 1953 movie is much better than the recent one, that radio is a dangerous weapon, that everyone except the Russians should leave space expeditions to Nasa, that underwhelming is a new word, and that aliens are not as intelligent as we think, because a recon team would have warned its siblings to not bother with Earth because it is governed by a (female) entity that is really just a process who is just otherwise like that.

While those are all good Points, the best is that I am usually surprised when I pick up a classic work, whether DVD or book, and especially when I have seen an updated version. The characters are sympathetic because they don't imagine they can take on monsters singlehandedly but that doesn't mean they are less brave. It isn't even part of their frame of reference. I usually expect to seethe at a woman forced into the dichotomy of mother and whore, but what I get is usually more complicated, something I am actually proud of (a forced connection, so perhaps what I mean is hopeful).