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I was trying to not give so many 5 star ratings this year, but after having thought a bit about „Passage� I fear I have to go for another one of the highest ratings.

The novel bears the same typical Connie Willis trademarks of characters missing one another through bad timing, trying to hide from other characters, non functioning equipment or a misleading environment (in this case it is a labyrinthian design of a hospital with corridors ever so often blocked because of repair and/or being painted). The running gag here is a cafeteria that seemingly never is open. We also have the usual bunch of crazy, slightly tropey side characters that feel like belonging into a sitcom. As always the story takes its time, the plot is slowly unfolding taking a lot of detours.

All these points I see frequently mentioned in reviews of her books as a negative, and I can see how those quirks could be offputting for some readers. For me they are what makes Connie Willis� writing special, recognizable and extremely loveable. After the first chapter I was again fully immersed in her nutcase world. The audio, which has a length of roughly 30 hours, was meant as my companion for the next week or so, but I raced through it in 3 days.

In the case of this novel the erratic flow wasn’t only a signature but an outside metaphor for the inside struggle that is at the heart of the story. Once I realised that I appreciated the typical style even more and this appreciation was what lead in the end to another 5 stars.

At the center of „Passage� are near death experiences (NDE). Psychologist Joanna Lander studies NDEs and tries to get to the how and why of it through factual approach while always finding herself a step behind her ‚colleague� Dr. Mandrake, a religious charlatan and author of best-selling After-Death-Experience books, who influences NDE patients with his leading questions and ruins their experience for Lander in the go.
Together with neurologist Richard Wright who runs a study where he is chemically evoking NDEs in a healthy subject group she hopes to get to the bottom of this phenomenon without interfering from Mandrake. Yet as more and more of the test group prove themselves unreliable for various reasons Lander decides to go under herself with a very weird result.

Willis attends to the subject with an unemotional eye. She stays off pathos or religious colouring on the one hand, but also doesn’t steer into the too dry field of mere scientific terms � even though she shows a well researched medical knowledge. The metaphysical experiences she describes feel ‚real� (as far as such a word is possible with this topic), she tries to find an answer and not to veil anything with obscure mysticism.

Not surprisingly one of the most prominent topics of her novel is the importance of being honest, even in the face of devastating truth. She condemms the notion of being lied to. This issue is masterfully brought to page with the character of nine year old Maisie suffering from cardiomyopathy and little hope of surviving. The girl is sick and tired of being lied to by adults who want her to stay positive and buries herself in the studies of human disasters like the sinking of the Titanic, the burning of the Hindenburg and others. Her obsession with those topics lets her become Joanna Lander’s secret study assistant who is the only one to tread her like an adult.
The paragraphs concerning Maisie and her view on life and the world in general are some of the very best moments in the book. Her fierceness and vulnerability are skillfully portrayed. I was rooting for her in a way that it even didn’t matter if she lived or died in the end. Every outcome would have felt right. Willis managed to overrule my everylasting fear of death with her writing and somehow let me make my peace with our mortality � not a small feat.

About two thirds into the book the author decided to go into a direction I have seldomly seen in novels (and which I can’t say much about for spoilery reasons) and which awed me even more, because it really worked.

Connie Willis is a literate, intelligent author and uses her knowledge well in her novels. So this time I learned a lot about disasters and literature and medical terms/procedures concerning cardiac arrest and how everything somehow connects to everything. But above all I learned about the importance of honesty and the healing effect of being useful.
Her holistic approach to life and death was a pleasure to behold and one more entry in my so-far-I-love-everything-she-wrote list.