The Passage focused on the response to the cataclysm and the strict government of the survivors (for example, children are not allowed to know about the disaster until a certain age).
Throughout the trilogy the central concerns are planning, management, pragmatism and resource allocation. What survives of us is not, despite the book’s sentimentality, love but bureaucracy. Humanity’s ubiquity conjures fantasies of its own extinction. When humanity has irreversibly changed the nature of the environment, the environment bites back – literally, in this case. The trilogy exemplifies Anthropocene masochism. This is where the book gets interesting, but perhaps as a symptom rather than a story. His oldest friend, now president of the Republic of Texas, is at loggerheads with him. One character knows the monsters will be back, and is refitting a boat so the survivors can sail off into the sunset.
There are now substantial settlements of beleaguered humans, and the real crisis is not shooting a “smoke” or “drac” or “flyer” in the chest, but creating a feasible tax regime. While Zero is completing his long-plotted plan of getting his own back on everyone, the narrative jumps forward another 20 years.
An inset novella, it tells of being a middle-class boy in a prestigious university, beguiled by wealth and crippled by self-doubt. The epic climax turns out to be bathetic, though the flashback to Patient Zero’s former life as Timothy Fanning is actually rather good. Here I come.” So, we now get the showdown with the Biggest Bad, and an exemplar of how a great concept and a satisfying closure are not necessarily related. The book ended with one of our heroes, now part vampire herself, swearing vengeance on Zero: “You bastard. A Big Bad was seen off.īigger Bads were seen off in The Twelve – except that it turns out they were all infected by “Patient Zero”, a scientist who first succumbed to the virus on an expedition to cheat death, which is never a good idea. With power and technology failing, a group of plucky youngsters – a heroic one a caring one an older, grizzled one a clever one a feisty one and one that’s earmarked for an early exit – set off to save the world, having teamed up with orphan Amy, whose exposure to the virus granted her longevity without fangs. Then the inevitable unleashing happened, and the reader was catapulted 90 years into the future, where a remnant of humanity now ekes out a threadbare and perilous existence in a besieged compound.
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