Ferryman

What Cronin is always good at is drawing you into the story. His great The Passage trilogy is a page-turner that creates a lively world in front of your eyes, with living, real human beings pushing on through a fantastic plot.

And this is obviously a strength of Cronin, for he does it again here. The story and most importantly, the protagonists, draw you in like you're there with them, actually. You want to know how they go on, what happens to them, what lies in their future.

Without saying too much, Cronin also tries to answer a very important question about the way our mind works, and what role dreams play in the maintenance of healthy, clean mind. This will be of utmost importance if humankind ever uses long sleep to, say, send astronauts on long pilgrimage across the vast distances of our universe, to the outer reaches of our solar system or beyond.

So, if you want to see it that way, Cronin was doing near-term mystery in The Passage, and is now doing long-term scifi in this book, yet the story's setting is itself actually much closer to The Passage than to any space opera. It's got not much to do with any SciFi at all.

The Ferryman lives in a future world populated by perfect humans living long and rich lives, before being sent off to be born again and live again. The Ferryman sees people off onto a ferry and welcomes them back again reborn. Where The Passage was a dystopia, the world of The Ferryman is an utopia. Yet The Ferryman dreams, which no one else does, and what he finds out because his dreams don't give him peace, is turning his world upside down, because nothing is really as it appears.

I'm going to read the next Cronin much sooner after its release than I did here, just because whatever Cronin writes is just such a joy to read.