PASSAGES: A Voyage from War to Peace is a novel about a psychiatrist and his patient. Miko is the son of a Greek fisherman who eschews the family business in favor of training to be a physician in the United States. Once there, he begins a residence at a medical facility and encounters one AJ, a Vietnam veteran. AJ’s peculiar demeanor—his un-together appearance yet sound recall, his suicidal behavior yet laconic manner—marks him out as an unusual case: someone who contains, as Miko suggests, “an odd filament of refinement.” As Miko discovers more about AJ’s past, he becomes more nondescript to the young resident. Nevertheless, demons of his own begin to surface following their sessions.
Author P. K. Edgewater negotiates the boundary between readable prose and genuine-sounding “medicalese” adroitly. Miko is a neophyte, just beginning on the process of becoming a psychiatrist; and AJ is his first patient, their sessions involving exploration of AJ’s psychological make-up. Characterization of these two protagonists is very good.
The relatively flat structure and thin plotting, however, present problems. Once Miko’s background is sketched, the novel jumps into his sessions with AJ, which continue (with very few interruptions) for well over half the novel’s length—later incorporating his wife as well. There isn't much tension, nor is there a B-plot to speak of; the reader is left somewhat floundering for focus. AJ’s experiences in the Navy were not particularly noteworthy. The book’s central revelations concerning AJ and Miko are interesting and heartfelt, as are the parallels between them—particularly the disconnect between each man’s peak experiences and their love lives—but feel insufficient to carry the weight of the story. The ending aims for profundity of the coming-full-circle sort but doesn’t achieve it, linking the lives of the two main characters together in a way that lacks wider significance.
There are also a few peculiar editorial decisions here and there. For one thing, it's odd that AJ’s monologues during his sessions with Miko include so many details that simply wouldn’t find their way into normal conversations. AJ’s citation of the hull number of the Navy ship he served on (included in parentheses) speaks less to the demotic and more of the author’s need to show off the fruits of their research. More egregious are the occasional crude generalizations. At one point Edgewater treats Europeans monolithically as being “fine with the exclusion of other nationalities in their social circles,” which is as untrue of them as it would be of Americans—to say nothing of his description of “stereotypical raging Mediterranean wom[e]n.” Presented as generalization, this offers material for examination of those stereotypes; presented as truth, it speaks to lazy characterization of other cultures.
Though P.K. Edgewater's PASSAGES: A Voyage from War to Peace has good characterization, its thin plot detracts from its writerly credentials.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader