Passage (2001) is a very difficult book for me to write about. I love it, right up until the last page, where it makes me furiously upset.
This is the fourth time I’ve read Passage, and apart from my problems with the very end it would probably be my favourite Willis book. It’s about people who are researching near death experiences, and it’s mostly a very brave book. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that people die and those who are left grieve. People sometimes die unexpectedly, in the middle of doing things, and children die and young adults, not just old people at the end of long lives. In Passage, like Doomsday Book, Willis uses a screwball comedy plot in the service of tragedy, and here Willis’s theme of misdirected communication is central and vital and drives the plot.
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