You’ve spent 40 or 50 years accumulating, then you start dismantling.” “There’s a tipping point and your mind starts to creak under that load a little bit. There’s more past than there is future,” he says. “The longer you go, the more life is accumulated in your head. Cronin, now 60, says the novel sprung out of a reflection on his age and stage of life. But we can reveal what questions the themes and plot are chasing. His father offers a cryptic clue, uttering the word “oranios.”įurther plot points would shortchange the reader of experiencing a novel in which the themes twist with the same gravity as the plot. Early in the book, Bennett is to ferry his father to the Nursery, a process that goes awry. At that point, Proctor Bennett, the novel’s ferryman, guides them to one of the islands, called the Nursery, where memories are erased and bodies are set back to teenage settings for a new life to live.

In “The Ferryman,” Cronin tells the story of Prospera, a trio of islands shielded from the rest of the planet, where an elite community of residents lives a comfortable existence until they reach a certain age. More than 500 pages eventually sprang from that moment. “And at the same time, I had this vision of an old man on a pier having some sort of psychological meltdown and scaring the wits out of people.” On a clear night, Cronin was walking on a pier when, he says, the word “oranios,” a variation on oranos or ouranos, a Greek god of the skies or heavens, dropped into his head. “The Ferryman” similarly sprung from a reflective moment. Three books and some 900,000 words later, he completed an epic tale with a cast of hundreds. Cronin was living in the Memorial area riding bicycles with his daughter when she urged him to write a story involving a heroic girl. The genesis of “The Passage” has been told to the point of codification, though it bears brief mention here. Details: free See More Collapse Getting older

The ferryman by justin cronin