sychologist Joanna Landry is studying near-death experiences--the events that patients at Mercy General Hospital remember after being brought back from clinical death. Unfortunately for her, Mercy General is the personal stomping grounds of a best-selling writer, a loudly energetic spiritualist whose overbearing "interviews" usually convince all but the strongest-willed patients that they shared his comforting (and profitable) visions of hosts of angels and welcoming dead relatives. Maurice Mandrake and his supporters are major contributors to the hospital, so running him off isn't an option, but finding subjects he hasn't tampered with is nearly impossible.
Neurologist Richard Wright is also researching NDEs. After a serendipitous accident involving a patient who had a heart attack during a brain scan, Richard isolated the portions of the brain that activate during an NDE, and found a psychoactive drug that stimulates those areas. In effect, he manufactures NDEs in the lab. But as a neurologist, he has little experience in interviewing patients or dealing with the recalcitrance and confabulation Joanna runs across on a daily basis.
It's a match made in heaven--Richard induces NDEs in volunteers, Joanna debriefs them afterward, and both cooperate to keep Mandrake in the dark. The problem is, most of their volunteers are flaky mystics ("Mondays would be best for me. My psychic powers are strongest on days governed by the moon goddess") or spies for Mandrake, or both. Ultimately, Joanna and Richard give in to the obvious and the inevitable, and start using practical, unprejudiced Joanna as a test subject.
Like so many of her test subjects, Joanne experiences the NDE as a sudden trip to a real, physical location--the proverbial long, dark tunnel with a light at the end. But as the tests continue and she explores that tunnel and steps into the light, she finds things that make no sense to her rational scientist's mind. In spite of Mandrake's attempts to interfere, pressure from Richard's backers to demonstrate that his work is successful and flaky-mystic-free, and the general daily chaos of working in a hospital environment, Joanna and Richard soldier on, trying to deduce the age-old mysteries of life and death by sneaking in the back door.
An emotionally exhausting trip
Even the grimmest of Connie Willis' deeply evocative, emotionally resonant novels usually has at least some humor in it, and Passage is no exception. Willis continues to draw on the Hollywood tradition of screwball comedies for some of her style and structure; Mercy General is a driven, dysfunctional environment where food is never available (the cafeteria is open at laughably erratic hours, leading to a running joke where Richard keeps a convenience store's worth of snack food in his lab-coat pockets), where comically over-the-top personalities like Mandrake and his sycophants lurk around every corner, and where the old buildings are connected via haphazard, mazelike passages that make simple trips between wards into sprawling adventures. As the starving, sleepless Joanna juggles her increasingly complex and demanding work duties with her responsibilities to friends, the pace sometimes grows both manic and comic.
But Passage is still a far cry from most of Willis' humorous work. The specter of death hangs palpably over the entire book, as Joanna deals with a deteriorating man in a coma, a pugnacious child with a rapidly worsening heart condition, a once-brilliant scholar who's disintegrating due to Alzheimer's disease, and her own increasingly threatening environment. Willis is usually an absolute master of thematic conjunction; the subtle foreshadowing in short stories like "All My Darling Daughters" and the Hugo-winning "The Last of the Winnebagos" is nothing short of inspiring. Here, the foreshadowing is somewhat more heavyhanded; tragedy and grief dog nearly every page. Reading it can be downright exhausting.
But of course, it's still a rewarding experience. Willis said in a recent Science Fiction Weekly interview that Passage may make "everybody in the United States mad" because it contains enough mysticism to annoy scientists and enough science to annoy mystics. Granted, she's focusing on a touchy topic. But she does so with a great deal of thought, wit, complexity and style. There are enough plot twists, right down to the surprising ending, to keep readers of all belief systems guessing; fans may be angry when they've finished, but Willis' talent all but guarantees that they'll hang on breathlessly until the bitter end.
