On the isolated island of Prospera, there are the haves and the have-nots—where the haves get rebooted, so to speak, when they get too old. All the one percenters wear a device on their arms that gives them a score from 1–100. If they dip below a certain number, it’s time for them to head to a neighboring island called the Nursery, where their memories are wiped and their bodies rejuvenated, ready to come back to Prospera as a child in an adult body, an apparent blank slate ready to begin a new life. No one leaves Prospera, and no one visits. Those that live there are in a small bubble of unknown origin, and no knowledge of what life was like before (if there ever was a before, that is).
Proctor Bennett is a Prosperan and a ferryman—a government official whose job is to usher the island’s elder citizens to the boat that takes them to the end of their known lives, one where their memories of practicing yoga and playing tennis at their local country club get erased. Unsurprisingly, there’s a big mystery that enshrouds Prospera as well as the Annex, where the have-nots live out life the old-school kind of way (i.e., they’re born out of people’s bodies and start out as babies) and work in jobs that serve the well-to-do Prosperans.
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The Ferryman
That mystery is the center of Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman. Things start to become undone for Proctor when he has to take his father to the ferry. From there, this world’s secrets slowly unravel in typical sci-fi thriller fashion, with its main character facing his own existential crisis in the process. Proctor is the quintessential privileged male protagonist, a dude who barrels his way through the mystery of the book with first-person purple prose as he finds himself either thrown into a thriller-esque action sequence or in a romantic entanglement with one of the two women who are in love with him (because of course there are two women in love with him) or having sex with someone else.
To call The Ferryman merely a thriller, however, is incorrect. Where Cronin has shined in his other works—both in his first foray into genre with The Passage (less so the two follow-ups) and in his previous novel about a family in Maine called The Summer Guest—is in his depiction of relationships, especially the ones between parent and child. The Ferryman also delves into these familial ties in a meaningful way, particularly around Proctor’s family, including his wife. Where the book fell short for me, however, was that Proctor was so fundamentally unlikeable and unsympathetic, that I could scarcely care about his struggles, his relationships, or even when his life was threatened. And while the novel does explore its central themes of grief and the questioning of what constitutes reality in an adequate manner, the emotions that come from those themes must be filtered through the point of view of Proctor, and because of that, their messages fall flat.
Yes, one could make an argument that Proctor is an anti-hero, an unlikeable protagonist who is intentionally far from perfect. His aforementioned purple prose certainly adds to that, making his words seem, at times, absurdly overblown for the situation at hand. Take, for example, this passage from page 93 of the hardcover edition, where Proctor describes his state of mind after getting up one morning, a bit out of sorts: “What a state I was in! A state of dreams from which I awoke to find myself in yet more dreams. Who was to say I wasn’t still asleep?” Shakespearean prose indeed for someone waiting for his cup of coffee to kick in.
Is Proctor supposed to be so—for lack of a better word—annoying? Unlikeable protagonists can certainly work, and this approach is all well and good. It’s one thing, however, to be unlikeable and another thing to simply not care about the travails an unlikeable character is going through, especially when the female characters in the book are treated in such a stereotypical fashion.
Women in this novel serve as mere support structures to Proctor, and with one notable exception, the main female characters in the book are either his mother or someone he has sex with. There’s a moment where one of these female characters takes on a larger role in the plot, but even that “twist” plays on common tropes given to mothers and how they’re “unstable” in the face of horrible events compared to their fatherly counterparts. Even when the book periodically switches out of Proctor’s point of view to one of the female characters, the talk is all still centered on Proctor, with very, very few moments where the women talk about anything unrelated to a man (and that man is usually Proctor).
The plot is also one that’s familiar in the genre space, with even the big twist that happens about 75 percent into the story being one that feels like it’s been done before. All in all, The Ferryman is a book that’s aiming for profound (Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a clear inspiration, for goodness sake!) but ends up on a well-trodden path where the characters aren’t compelling enough and the heartstrings it’s attempting to pull on are not strong enough to make its 538 pages a memorable or even worthwhile read.
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin is published by Ballantine Books.
Vanessa Armstrong is a writer with bylines at The LA Times, SYFY WIRE, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Penny and her husband Jon, and she loves books more than most things. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her on Twitter @vfarmstrong.
