The Ferryman

What Cronin is always good at is drawing you into the story. His great The Passage trilogy is a page-turner that creates a lively world in front of your eyes, with living, real human beings pushing on through a fantastic plot.

And this is obviously a strength of Cronin, for he does it again here. The story and most importantly, the protagonists, draw you in like you're there with them, actually. You want to know how they go on, what happens to them, what lies in their future.

Without saying too much, Cronin also tries to answer a very important question about the way our mind works, and what role dreams play in the maintenance of healthy, clean mind. This will be of utmost importance if humankind ever uses long sleep to, say, send astronauts on long pilgrimage across the vast distances of our universe, to the outer reaches of our solar system or beyond.

So, if you want to see it that way, Cronin was doing near-term mystery in The Passage, and is now doing long-term scifi in this book, yet the story's setting is itself actually much closer to The Passage than to any space opera. It's got not much to do with any SciFi at all.

The Ferryman lives in a future world populated by perfect humans living long and rich lives, before being sent off to be born again and live again. The Ferryman sees people off onto a ferry and welcomes them back again reborn. Where The Passage was a dystopia, the world of The Ferryman is an utopia. Yet The Ferryman dreams, which no one else does, and what he finds out because his dreams don't give him peace, is turning his world upside down, because nothing is really as it appears.

I'm going to read the next Cronin much sooner after its release than I did here, just because whatever Cronin writes is just such a joy to read.

”Arrival come.”

This was my first Justin Cronin book, and I went into it blind without anything but the summary to go by. I’m pretty sure I liked it? I’m pretty sure I liked it a whole lot, actually? But I also have problems with it? I don’t know, my feelings are very mixed, but I don’t have the heart to give it a 3 star rating because there’s just so much good here.

So, just as a vague, incomplete, surface-level summary, Prospera is a utopian society created to shield its residents from the world collapsing outside. Within Prospera as a Prosperan, life is what you make of it. You can spend your time doing whatever it is that fulfills you, in the manner you see fit. Your life is forever ticking down though, and when the meter in your arm falls below a certain point, you’re sent off to the Nursery. Your memories are wiped clean, your body is renewed and refreshed, and you start again in a new life with a new purpose. Life is calm, perfect, and grand. Prospera requires its fair share of custodians however, and these people make up the population of the Annex, your housekeepers, nannies, groundskeepers, and a whole host of residents who keep the island running. Life isn’t as grand and perfect as it is for the Prosperans, and tension rises between them constantly as a result.

The story is told from two points of view – first person from the point of view of Proctor, a “ferryman” whose job involves picking up the Prosperans whose meters fall below acceptable levels and dropping them off at the Nursery, and third person from the point of view of Thea, a resident of the Annex and part-time seditionist working with a group in the Annex. In addition to the conventional rising tensions between the Prosperans (“Prossies”) and the Annex, there’s quite a bit of sci-fi mystery overtones. What does Proctor’s dad’s final words about “Ouranios” mean? Who is Caeli? What is this “arrival come” religion that has taken hold in the Annex? Why does Proctor dream at night but nobody else does?

There’s a lot going on with this book. I was deeply, heavily, intensely invested in the answers to all the sci-fi weirdness that kept cropping up, so much so that I was willing to overlook how slow the start is. There’s quite a bit of worldbuilding and stakes to set up at the beginning, and it isn’t until after the first third of the book is up or so that the actual rollercoaster ride starts. Things get incredibly wild, and even though I thought I had things more or less figured out, it turns out I really didn’t. I like that unexpectedness, honestly.

I’m going to put what I didn’t like in spoilers, because a lot is contingent on plot. Suffice it to say that the answers have flaws if you think about it too much. Intense ending spoilers here: What I didn’t like was how messy the answers end up being. There’s a lot of stuff to wrap up, and I was surprised to see most of it addressed at around the 60% mark. If you’re like me, once you have the answers, the book starts to lose its shine a bit because nothing’s mysterious anymore. I also didn’t like that Proctor essentially avoided the judgment of the colonists by dropping them all off, turning the ship around, and throwing himself back into the simulation while he headed back to Earth, presumably to….see what happened? It felt like a cop-out on Proctor’s part and rather than face all the outrage at what had been done to them within the simulation, he ran away. Also also, Proctor was the one who set up the police state to begin with? What the hell? I dunno, it didn’t seem like something Proctor would do, but then again, we only really got to know simulation-Proctor and not Director Proctor.

BUT… there’s a ton to like here, and overall I really enjoyed the wild ride. I’ve even been compelled to seek out Cronin’s other series, The Passage, to see what that’s all about. Just a really unique experience all around that I’m glad I took the time to read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an electronic copy in exchange for an honest review.