Thank you to Orion for having on the blog tour for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Political, poignant and surreal, this book played out like a movie, and I lapped it all up. Besides, when Proctor’s world gets turned upside down, the story goes careening at a million miles per hour. In saying that, I didn’t mind this because of the prose and Justin’s ability to pique the interest. Though I loved the in depth characterisation and worldbuilding in the first pages, I can see how readers who enjoy a faster pace might find it a little slow. Commentary on race, class and religion are all wrapped in a futuristic bow that questions the value of dreams, the fate of humanity and at what cost we escape hell of our own making. There was also a strange dreamlike-quality to the prose and the way the scenes unfolded which coincidentally fit brilliantly with the plot of this book – that resulted in a undercurrent of tension and just the right amount of eerienessm for me. Seen through a conspiratorial lens, there were moments where I questioned whether maybe Proctor wasn’t seeing this nightmarish world for the utopia it really was, and I think, in a way, that made me root for him even more. As a huge fan of his Passage trilogy and especially his ability to weave not only a gripping plot, but also these very human stories, I was happy to see Proctor come to life as a flailing, fighting, flawed man who at times almost felt like an unreliable narrator. With this, Justin Cronin has done it again.
When we first meet our Ferryman, Proctor, his life is a happy one, but when he’s assigned to ferry his father for ‘reiteration’ – a sort of reincarnation – things start to crumble at some of his father’s final words: “The world is not the world…”. Three islands, seemingly the last, include the thriving Prospera, the resistance-prone Annex and The Nursery.
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