The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
Published May 7, 2024 by Ballantine Books
Rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a book that I became aware of some time ago, but was in no rush to read it and therefore forgot most of the synopsis. My expectation going in was something along the lines of the Flying Dutchman from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. A ferryman would collect the recently dead and transport them to the other side, with the story focusing on the care given to those souls along the way. That’s definitely not what this book was.
The ferryman takes place on a set of islands that were isolated from the rest of the world by an electromagnetic field to protect its inhabitants from the end of the world everywhere else. The first island, Prospera, is where people that can be reiterated (essentially reborn) live. They have a monitor in their forearm that can be accessed to show their mental and physical well-being, and they can’t have biological children as a side effect of being reiterants. Prosperans are the wealthy and powerful people in this world. Everything in Prospera is clean, beautiful, and optimized for a happy life.
The second island is called the Annex, and that is where people as we know them live. They only live one life, have children the traditional way, and do not have any monitoring systems in their bodies. They are the support people for Prospera, filling all of the dirty jobs and servant roles that make life so pleasant for Prosperans. The Annex is this rundown place where people barely make enough to survive, and its people are subject to the violent whims of Prosperan guards that sometimes roam the streets.
The third island is the Nursery, where Prosperans are sent to be reiterated and they are prepared to reenter Prospera as mid-teens. Very little is known about this island or how its processes work. Reiterants don’t retain memories of actually being reiterated, and their memories from previous iterations are wiped as part of the process.
The way that the people are described was just enough to make them feel real, and pulled me into the story more just to see what they would do next. None of them were made to be these perfect people where nothing bad ever happens and they never do anything wrong. At the end it left me not necessarily liking any of them, but I was satisfied by the outcomes and the growth that lead to them.
There is a somewhat predictable twist that still pulls the reader into the confusion of the characters, and takes a more logical approach to what happens next. There is a point where an element is discussed that I think the applicable information had been edited out, so that adds some clunkiness to the final chapters. By that point, though, I was having such a good time with the book that it didn’t both me much. Especially because, by that point, you know where things are heading.
My favorite thing about this book, though, is the logical. Characters ask the logical questions and pay attention to what is going on around them. None of them are perfect, and that imperfection affects what they do and how they do it.
This isn’t a perfect book by any means, but it’s one that I would gladly recommend to people looking for a new dystopian to read. Even though it would have to be very different, I hope there is a sequel or other novel that continues the story for some of the people.
If anyone else has read it, please leave a comment below. I would love to read your thoughts.
justanotherreader 