''Passage'' (2007) is a
historical novel
Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting related to the past events, but is fictional. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for historical fiction literature, it can also be applied to other ty ...
by
John David Morley
John David Morley (21 January 1948 – 18 February 2018) was an English writer and novelist.
Early life
The third and youngest child of the artist and sculptor Patricia Morley (née Booth) and John Arthur Elwell Morley, a District Officer in t ...
, the story of one man's journey through five centuries of existence in the
New World.
Summary
Abducted by
conquistadors in the year 1500, the merchant's ward Pablito (alias White Water Bird, alias Paul Zarraté, alias Paul Straight, alias "the World’s Greatest Living Wonder") passes through five books and five ages of man, as he travels from the primordial forests of the Amazon to the
Incan empire of
Tahuantin-Suyu, to the slave-plantations of colonial
Pernambuco, via antebellum
New Orleans, to the
1893 Chicago World's Fair
The World's Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World's Fair) was a world's fair held in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492. The centerpiece of the Fair, hel ...
, before witnessing the birth of
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
and the explosion of an
atomic bomb
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...
.
Reception
"The testimony of this decelerated man makes for a long, luxuriantly detailed read," Charles Fernyhough noted in''
The Sunday Telegraph''. "This sweeping but pacey '
palimpsest' of a novel wraps up the past of an entire hemisphere in one mesmerising voice," declared
Boyd Tonkin in ''
The Independent''. “Funny, depressing, optimistic, bleak, fantastic, mundane: John David Morley's remarkable new novel is all of these, often in the space of a single paragraph,” wrote James Porteous in
''The Herald'': "Morley's themes of
time,
memory,
sleep,
death,
religion,
myth
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...
and
longevity
The word " longevity" is sometimes used as a synonym for "life expectancy" in demography. However, the term ''longevity'' is sometimes meant to refer only to especially long-lived members of a population, whereas ''life expectancy'' is always d ...
evoke
Borges and
Marquez and their mixture of magic and mundane. At its best, the book bears comparison with those masters." The critic
Frank Kermode hailed ''Passage'' as "a remarkable feat of imagination and sheer narrative energy, the apotheosis of the
''picaro''."
In translation
In 2011, ''Passage'' was published in Spanish as ''La Noche Será Larga'' in a translation by Claudia Conde.
References
External links
*
Anita Sethi"''Passage'' by John David Morley" ''The Independent'' (September 14, 2008).
{{Novels by John David Morley
2007 British novels
Picaresque novels
British historical novels
British philosophical novels
Novels by John David Morley