A dystopian thriller--Part 2

While Justin Cronin had published two critically well-received novels, The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, he burst onto the best-seller list in 2010 with The Passage, a blockbuster dystopian novel.

That book told of a girl named Amy who is taken to a facility in Colorado, where a government experiment goes wrong and unleashes an army of deadly creatures that soon engulf America. Amy becomes the world’s best hope for survival.

The Twelve (Ballantine, $28) is the second book of a trilogy. Like The Passage, it recounts events in the present, then jumps 100 years into the future. At the beginning of the apocalyptic catastrophe, we meet three main characters: Lila, a doctor who’s expecting a baby and becomes delusional; Kittridge, a former special-ops soldier who fights the creatures called virals; and April, a teenager trying to protect her younger brother from death and destruction. They encounter one another as they navigate their way through a dangerous landscape across Kansas, Nebraska and into Iowa.

Then the narrative jumps 100 years into the future, where Amy and others try to overcome the power of the twelve original virals or vampires who control the thousands of virals that prey on the dwindling population of survivors. How these are connected to the twelve is complicated and not entirely clear to me.

The fast-paced narrative moves from one set of characters to another, an unsettling experience that nevertheless keeps one reading, longing for everything to tie together. Cronin is adept at building suspense, though with so many characters and plots, it nearly overwhelms the reader.

Of particular note is the presence of strong female characters—not only Amy but Alicia, a fighter extraordinaire, and Sara, a mother who is captured and taken to Fort Powell, Iowa, a horrific place that is like a concentration camp, and who fights to survive and save her daughter.

Cronin has said in interviews that the idea for The Passage Trilogy came from a challenge from his 8-year-old daughter to write the story of “a girl who saves the world.” From that idea he has created a whole other world with many characters and complex narratives.

This world, much of it set in the middle of the country, from Texas up to Iowa, mostly rings true, though at one point he mentions “a grid of cornfields” (not wheatfields) in western Kansas.

Cronin teaches at Rice University, and his fondness for literature comes through often. Kittridge, holed up in Denver, reads books by Faulkner, Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald and Melville. Cronin writes: “There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again.”

Beyond the pleasures of a well-written thriller with characters that have some complexity, reading The Twelve makes one wonder about the popularity of such dystopian novels. Perhaps it’s a way to face our fears, even when they aren’t realistic. And there’s pleasure in seeing resolution to the struggle against such deadly threats to humanity.

A final resolution, however, will have to wait for the third and final volume in Cronin’s trilogy. I’m hooked enough to want to read it.

Movies (gasp) with female leads

Ever heard of the Bechdel test? Named after the comic-strip artist and memoirist Alison Bechdel, it assesses movies according to a three-step formula. To pass the test, a film “(1) has to have at least two [named] women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something besides a man.”

Although a visit to the website bechdeltest.com suggests that things have been improving recently, the test underscores the reality that most films are presented primarily with male protagonists and from a male perspective.

In an article in the New York Times (“Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship,” Dec. 6), film critic A.O. Scott points out that 2012 has been not only a good year for movies but “a pretty good year for female heroism.”

He names some movies with female protagonists: Snow White and the Huntsman, Brave, Hunger Games, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty. This can be misleading, though, since the top-selling movies of the year, such as The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider Man and Skyfall feature mostly male heroes and are geared to a male (mostly teenage) audience.

And when we get to the Oscar race for best picture, the favorites, among whom may be Argo, Flight, Lincoln and The Master, feature male leads. An exception likely will be Zero Dark Thirty, which, though it features a female lead, is about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden and thus appeals to male audiences.

While there are more Hollywood movies with female leads, these parts often resemble male leads in action films—they fight and kill their enemies.

Scott laments the loss of an earlier era, when Hollywood took “pride in its ‘woman’s pictures,’ a category that embraced many of the immortal romances and melodramas of the studio era and that made actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman into powerful industry players as well as adored stars.”

That era also included many intelligent comedies with strong female characters. Such films are rarer today.

One place to broaden one’s exposure to female roles is in foreign films, either through Netflix or other sites. Many French films have strong female leads that aren’t under 30.

And if you look at British TV shows, you often find female leads who are older, not always strikingly beautiful and don’t look anorexic.

Beyond simply finding films with female leads, it is rewarding to find films with interesting characters. In such films, the characters develop and face complex situations beyond merely seeking revenge for some despicable act.

Scott offers some examples from this year. One is Amour, which won Canne’s Palme d’Or last May, tells of a couple in their 80s. Scott writes: “Anne, who is a wife, a mother, a musician and a teacher and whose decline and death, in the company of her faithful husband, Georges, constitute as intensely particular and as grandly universal a story as you could want. Anne is completely (and painfully) human. She is more than the sum of her domestic, artistic and professional roles, even though she bears the traces, in her extraordinary face, of the various roles she has performed.”

Films can serve to show us life and introduce us to new understandings of our life in this world. Portraying that world too exclusively from a male perspective does not serve us. 

Invest in infrastructure now or pay much more later

After every natural disaster, it seems, there is talk about being better prepared for the next one. Yet little usually happens. People often move back to dangerous settings, and U.S. infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

True to form, ideas and promises emerged after Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the East Coast. In his Newsweek article “Everyday Armageddon” (Nov.26/Dec. 3, 2012), David Cay Johnston writes: “If we are to avoid the next major catastrophe—and it will come—then we have to start paying the bill now.”

Johnston notes that “America spends just 2.4 percent of its economy on infrastructure, compared with 5 percent in Europe.”

As New York and New Jersey (among other states) look at rebuilding, their governors and others are calling for a clear strategy. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “You cannot build a skyscraper economy on a foundation designed for a farmhouse; it will collapse under its own weight.”

Johnston points out that if we fail to make sufficient investment in infrastructure, we can expect bursting dams after heavy rains, falling highway and railway bridges, sinkholes, massive electrical outages, more flooding, forest (and urban) fires and commutes disrupted for weeks, maybe months, as rail lines, roads and tunnels are rebuilt.

He goes on to suggest 12 projects “where investing corporate and tax dollars would not only pay off now by creating jobs and making the economy more efficient but would save lives while reducing future costs.”

Here is a summary of his 12 projects:

1. Accelerate replacement of natural gas pipelines. During Sandy, leaking gas fueled hundreds of fires.

2. Stop AT&T and Verizon from shutting down the old copper-wire telephone system, the only telecommunications that work when the electric grid goes down and cellphone-tower batteries run out of juice.

3. Demand that electric utilities replace power poles as they wear out and maintain equipment, especially changing oils in large transformers before they congeal and stick, to reduce long-term costs.

4. Increase tree trimming to prevent downed electrical lines during storms and move more lines underground to make the electric grid more reliable.

5. Promote smaller grids instead of the vast multistate grids now being developed that can throw millions of people into darkness because of one mistake or even one fallen limb.

6. Develop a 10-year plan to tear down, rebuild or strengthen every dam rated risky by the civil-engineering society.

7. Replace within a decade every large water and sewer main past its predicted life, with an emphasis on the largest pipes.

8. Place big warning signs on every highway bridge, advising motorists of when the structure should have been rebuilt or replaced and when, if ever, work is scheduled to begin.

9. Invest in riprap seawalls that extend perpendicular from the shoreline into the sea. These structures capture drifting sand and build up and maintain sand dunes and the vegetation that holds them in place.

10. Replace rail lines running through marshlands with elevated structures. This would limit commuter service disruptions after future storms.

11. Rebuild marshes and other natural barriers, like oyster reefs, that absorb the shock of storms.

12. Require detailed emergency plans by natural-gas, electric, water and telecommunications utilities as a condition of keeping their licenses.

Prevention is cost-effective and the wisest course. But the chances our short-term-thinking leaders will take such a course are slim.