Now, Cronin is looming over us again with another apocalyptic novel, this one more batty than vampiric. “The Ferryman” grabs bits of stardust from several sci-fi classics. The trippy effect is like watching “Inception” on an airplane while the passenger next to you watches “The Matrix” without earphones. Indeed, to get through this chaotic story, you’ll need the red pill and the blue pill and some Adderall.
The eerie first half — by far the better — is set on Prospera, an island paradise hidden from the rest of the world by an impenetrable electromagnetic barrier. “Prosperans,” as the glorious inhabitants are called, enjoy a civilization “free of all want and distraction.” They devote their attractive selves entirely to “creative expression and the pursuit of personal excellence.”
Like good Republicans, Prosperans imagine that everything about their system of static privilege is “entirely beneficent.” But members of the vast “support staff” harbor a somewhat different impression. Crammed onto a dreary adjacent island known as the Annex, these men and women of supposedly “lesser biological and social endowments” are expected to perform their various duties without complaint. And mostly, they do. If a few stress fractures are starting to zigzag across the surface of that social arrangement, the powers that be remain convinced they can keep control.
Control turns out to be the primary principle of this society, as it is in so many utopias. Beneath their shiny skins, Prosperans are biologically sterile but technically immortal. They maintain their vitality through a repeated process of bodily “reiteration.” They all arrive — or re-arrive — as polite 16-year-olds and begin living lives of “the highest aspirations,” which is how you can tell this is a fantasy.
Each one of them has something like a super-duper Apple Watch embedded in their forearm that constantly monitors physical and emotional health. When their natural faculties begin to fade — but before the deprivations and humiliations of age cut too deeply — they’re ferried to Nursery Isle, where they’re reiterated in some new identity, like a recycled Pepsi can. Most Prosperans willingly sail off to the Nursery, eager “to be reborn as a fresh-faced bright-eyed teenager in perfect health.” But sometimes, alas, a reluctant or confused old fogey must be persuaded. Think “Logan’s Run” with a touch of “Throw Momma From the Train.”
Although Cronin made his reputation by destroying the world, he’s actually better at building it, with all its attendant faults. Our narrator, Proctor Bennett, is one of the highly respected ferrymen who lead expiring Prosperans to the dock and launch them over to Nursery Isle for a refresh. The hypnotic horror of this exposition arises from how reasonable and gracious Proctor sounds, how much pride he takes in ritualized euthanasia. “We were,” he tells us, “the shepherds of emotional order in one of life’s most challenging moments.”
But the placid tone of Proctor’s life is shattered early in the novel. Soon after he explains to us the exquisite order of life on Prospera, he receives an unusual assignment: He’s to escort his own 126-year-old father to the ferry for reiteration. “You’ll make new memories,” Proctor tells his old man, falling back on the usual script. “Think how wonderful it’s going to feel to be young again, your whole life ahead of you.”
His father seems resigned to the process, to his duty, and everything is going fine until suddenly it isn’t. In a flash of resistance, the old man must be violently restrained. His dignity evaporates. It’s a scandal. Witnesses are unnerved, disgusted by the public violation of such a foundational taboo.
But Proctor is even more deeply shaken by this experience. Nightmares — typically not possible for Prosperans — continually trouble his sleep. Worse still, Proctor feels that something about his surroundings has gone fundamentally askew. Friends are sympathetic. Colleagues are concerned. High-ranking officials are alarmed about what Proctor’s father might have told him in those frantic moments before he was ferried off to the Nursery. And rebel agents from the Annex believe they may have found in Proctor someone to help their cause.
All the elements are here for a spectacular sci-fi thriller full of piercing implications for our own class-bound society, with its paralyzing fear of aging. But Cronin has something far more ambitious and metaphysical in mind, which throws “The Ferryman” off its tracks.
Just as the class-warfare plot starts to rumble, the ground shifts wildly beneath Proctor’s feet — and ours. “Then I was falling,” he says. “Falling and falling and falling. Down and down and down,” carrying my hopes for this long novel along with him. The creepy utopia Proctor depended on vanishes, and he finds himself in a hallucinatory realm of baffling experiences.
This is clearly meant to be a stunning development, ripe with provocative reflections on the nature of consciousness and the creative power of perception. But unfortunately, those deeper issues dissolve in a vat of melodrama: chases, shootouts and fires along with clones, billionaires and maniacal villains spouting cartoonish dialogue. And all of this is somehow glommed on to the lachrymose story of a grieving parent and a dying world. If nothing else, Cronin has out-cuckooed Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land.”
“The Ferryman” wants to explore what’s real and what’s illusion, and I’m as eager as the next Platonist to be enlightened by the true nature of reality, but this late in the philosophical game, authors have got to bring something special to the cave wall. Unfortunately, Cronin’s topsy-turvy thriller is torn apart by the unsustainable imbalance between its profound intentions and its ultimately silly execution.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
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