Passage
by Connie Willis

Connie Willis has a way of writing stories (both short stories and novel length) that captures my attention from the start, puts me into the minds of her characters, and doesn't let go until the end. Her book, Passage, does not fail in this respect. It is a remarkable book that looks at a possibly spiritual subject in an manner that, while not original, is interesting and fascinating.

That spiritual subject is NDEs or Near Death Experiences. The major character in the book (of which there are a few) is a researcher into NDEs. She goes around a hospital, recording the NDEs of patients who have died and being revived.

However, unlike a colleague of her at the hospital who has written several best-selling books about NDEs and is only interested in making sure the patients NDEs match his vision of "Heaven," "angels" and "messages from the other side", she is truly interested in finding out why some patients experience NDEs. Are they really messages from somewhere else or attempts by the (possibly dying) brain to keep alive or something else?

She is joined in her quest by a neurologist who, using a new type of brain scanner, has possibly captured the state of the brain during an NDE. Using various drugs and chemicals, he believes he can simulate an NDE and hopes to use the drugs to help revive patients who may be dying. But he needs her help to make sure patients are really experiencing NDEs and not 'confabulating' visions and data out of the experimenters' expectations. In this, she proves more than capable, eliminating some fake subjects; unfortunately this leaves him with too few subjects to test on. She then offers herself as a test subject and this is where the book becomes fascinating.

After undergoing NDEs, she get the feeling that the place she sees in the NDE is familiar. Her investigations into her NDEs, trying to find out what it means and why she finds the place so familiar make up the bulk of the book. She feels that if she finds out what her NDEs mean, she may be able to figure out what NDEs are for. Eventually she does but the revelation is unexpected and the ending of the novel is a frantic rush to verify the observation and to put it to practical use.

Into this book, Willis has put many of her trademarks; people wander all over the place in the hospital because walkways follow convoluted paths. People hide and run to avoid other people they don't want to meet, and some NDE patients simply cannot stop talking about their experiences or, in the case of one subject, his experiences during the Second World War. Yet another patient in the hospital, a young kid, is obsessed with disasters and she perpetually thinks up of excuses to keep her visitors around.

Despite the huge cast of supporting characters, most of the novel concentrate on the two main ones doing NDE research and it is easy to follow their work and to become fascinated by what they are trying to do.

The novel also works as a detective novel as you try to work out just what it is about NDEs that fascinates the characters and why they find it familiar. Are NDEs just figments of our imagination, created out of randomly firing neurons in the brain, or are they some kind of message that may help to revive dying patients? You may find the answers given in this book fascinating.

[Home Page][Index of Reviews][Kling Klang Klatch][Phase Space]

Passage by Connie Willis

Passage
by Connie Willis