Author Justin Cronin isn’t in search of a happy ending
‘The Ferryman’ writer seeks ‘an ending where what is worth saving is evident’
Justin Cronin wants to save the world.
That may not be readily apparent, given that Cronin, over the course of his best-selling 2010s “Passage” trilogy, has laid spectacular waste to North America and the world at large, killing off vast swaths of humankind via a deadly vampire-inflicted virus. Or that, in his latest novel “The Ferryman,” released May 2, he foists a different but no less existential peril upon his characters.
But the author, who teaches at Rice University and lives the rest of the year in Centerville, is something of an optimist, albeit one with a lot of doomsday baggage. “I was born during the Cuban missile crisis,” he said in a recent video interview. “The existential question created in 1945 was, do you want to survive? Across the ’50s, we talked about the survivability of global nuclear conflict, then abandoned that idea completely in favor of mutual assured destruction. These are the clouds I grew up with over my head.”
Some people go to therapy; others write a 900,000-word dystopian epic to work through their preoccupations with loss, disaster, and mass extinction. “The Passage” was not purely a personal exorcism, however. Cronin, an animated figure whose energy transmits even through the flattened dimensions of Zoom, is thoughtful about his work and the place that apocalyptic stories serve in the public psyche, especially in the current age of national fracture.
“Reading nonfiction, you get information, you learn facts,” he said. “[But when] you read fiction, you experience something more directly. It’s my one small gesture towards my fellow earthlings, to write these stories that will be diverting and entertaining but [also] express something serious. The act of reading is an experience of shared humanity, which is what is missing right now.”
“The Ferryman” — without getting too far into spoiler territory — is an intricate mystery that deals with loss and devastation on levels both personal and global. It’s a love story as well, or rather a catalog of love stories, between the characters — residents of the island of Prospera, where nobody dies, and its connected Annex — and also in a more comprehensive sense.
“Am I looking for a happy ending? Not per se, but I’m looking for an ending where what is worth saving is evident,” he said. “That’s the job of apocalyptic literature.”
He cites love, particularly parents’ for their children, as one of humankind’s redeeming qualities, but for Cronin, art and literature are also cornerstones of a world worth saving — or building. His enthusiasm for books and movies runs deep, although not necessarily toward the objects you might expect. “The Passage” drew comparisons to Stephen King’s “The Stand” (virus) and “Salem’s Lot” (vampires), but he credits Larry McMurtry’s great Western “Lonesome Dove” both for giving him the road novel structure for “The Passage” and for showing him that there is “a difference between form and formula.” (A lengthy section of “The City of Mirrors,” the third book in the trilogy, was based on that icon of dystopian literature, Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.”)
“The Ferryman” also takes its bones from a classic, the final epigraph of the novel hailing from “The Tempest,” a selection that required no mental rummaging to recall. As a Harvard undergraduate in the 1980s, Cronin said, his “old-fashioned, quite stodgy education in English literature” meant that “I just read everything.”
The other artistic influence on “The Ferryman”?
“The last two minutes of ‘Planet of the Apes.’”
While acknowledging that he’s learned much about storytelling from TV, and is at work on a screen adaptation of “The Ferryman,” Cronin remains a novelist at heart, noting that writing is a solitary endeavor in which your inner life is put to the page. He prefers to face that process on his own rather than with an army of other writers and producers.
And he maintains that as the “local god” of their story, a writer should be kind and allow every character, even the “villains,” their own humanity.
“You have to decide what kind of story you want to tell,” he says, “and I made a decision early on in my writing life that I would send everybody to heaven in the end.”