Plague in literature

Way back in the seventies, I vaguely recall reading a novel called The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton, a competently-written thriller among lots of other similarly well-written ones of the time, which depicted humanity threatened by a deadly virus. I remember nothing else about it, and it has vanished as so many other best-sellers do over time.

    As a student I also remember reading a rather better novel by Albert Camus – La Peste, or The Plague. Set in Oran, in the then French colony of Algeria, in the 1940s during an outbreak of the plague, it focused on the life and work of a doctor in the beleaguered city, and the psychology and behaviour of a population subjected to such a threat. Humans do not generally come out well in those circumstances; Rieux does his human best.

    I can remember teaching Daniel Defoe’s novel (note that, novel) A Journal of the Plague Year, which recalls the dreaded year 1665 in London. Again, people behave very badly, very selfishly, and irrationally in the circumstances; in those days there was almost no knowledge of how disease originated or spread, so the effects of the outbreak – almost an annual occurrence but far more devastating in that particular year are particularly horrible.

Defoe’s book is interesting on a number of counts. It is a work of fiction, written by a man who was only a small child in the actual year of the plague outbreak, yet it is presented as a diary account by someone who lived through the events of that year in London, with all sorts of details to emphasise its verisimilitude. Defoe was a journalist by profession, and so knew how to use and present his source material to great effect, and yet this book also has a claim to be one of the very first novels written in the English language.

    And finally, a novel with which I’m a little more familiar, from having read or listened to the audiobook rather more recently, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, set in England in the 21^st century, when the world is devastated by an illness which clears the planet of its human inhabitants. Here is another novel with disease – or rather, the effects of disease – at its centre, but in the romantic vein in which she writes, Shelley is actually far more interested in the picture of a gradually emptying land and its exploration and traversing by a shrinking band of the nation’s elite. It’s as limited a work of science fiction as is her more famous Frankenstein in terms of detailed imagination of the future (although her vision of England as a republic has a certain charm), but absolutely marvellous in the way it can draw the reader into the solipsistic vein of imagining her/himself as the sole survivor of the species with the entire world as their oyster…

Apocalyptic literature is a genre mainly from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, although writers have tended to imagine humanity wiping itself out through warfare rather than being taken unawares by a disease it cannot cure or master.

 

I’m wondering whether to revisit Camus or Defoe at the moment…have gone with Defoe.

Ellis Meredith: The Master Knot of Human Fate

The resume of this Librivox audiobook grabbed me, and so I downloaded it to listen to in the car.

A natural cataclysm of some sort – never truly explained or clarified – isolates a man and a woman, who knew each other in their previous existence – on an island some where California and the western US used to be. Luckily (!) everything necessary for their basic survival is on hand…

I was interested to learn about the cataclysm, and was disappointed. I was interested to see how their Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson existence panned out, but, apart from everything going just swimmingly, I learned little. A home and smallholding, conveniently abandoned, was to hand.

I wondered if anyone else had survived. Our heroes hope against hope for a sign, a ship; after a year one appears on the horizon, and they signal to it – perhaps rather foolishly, it might seem – but next morning it is revealed to have been an abandoned wreck, and not even useful supplies can be gleaned from the wreck, as Robinson managed three centuries ago. So they are alone.

A twenty-first century reader would wonder about the possibility of emotion and sexual attraction between them, isolated for the duration. Clearly they were fond of each other in their previous world, and they do grow closer. They realise that they may be the only humans left alive, and reflect on whether they have a duty to continue the species. And they engage in interminable religious and philosophical discussions about this, and about what faith their putative offspring should be raised in…. Everything is sauced and spiced with liberal doses of nineteenth century religion (the novel was written in 1901); they must be sure they ‘love’ each other and have absolutely no doubts about what they are about to undertake, before they devise a wedding ceremony for themselves, and she happens to find an old wedding-dress in a trunk.

And then the story ends.

Reader, do not waste your time either reading or listening to this book: it really isn’t worth it. Maudlin, tiresome and sentimental, it should have stayed forgotten. Librivox and Project Gutenberg do a great job of restoring access to forgotten literature of the past, but this one could have quite well stayed lost, I think.

MP Shiel: The Purple Cloud

A very late Gothic tale (1901) over-written in the purple(!) and breathless prose of Frankenstein and other novels of that ilk, it’s another tale of apocalypse: disaster this time is linked to the first (sacrilegious) attempt to reach the North Pole: a purple cloud of cyanide gas swirls around the planet annihilating all living beings, save our narrator (and his later-to-be-discovered female counterpart…). It’s unclear how, exactly he survives, but he then proceeds to do what we would probably all do in similar circumstances: he searches and explores everywhere, randomly, looking for survivors, indulges all his whims, embarks on an orgy of destruction, drifts in and out of insanity…

Eventually he comes across a female survivor who has lived in an airtight underground vault all her life; he is drawn to her, as you would expect, but also repelled, as he cannot face the prospect of being party to starting the whole human calamity off all over again, and spend the latter stages of the novel wresting with his and her feelings until the inevitable resolution.

I’ve probably made it seem rather daft, and not worth the eyeball time; it is a historical curiosity in many ways, and the initial premise is far less credible that Ronald Wright‘s (see my last post); as a novel about an apocalypse it’s not as good as The Last Man or After London, but it’s still worth a read for any afficionados of the genre. Shiel does raise real questions: how would an individual cope with being the sole survivor of the species? What about the moral issues involved in being the last couple: is there a duty to continue the species, or would the planet be happier without homo sapiens? Is there any guarantee against the species making the same mistakes all over again?

Ronald Wright: A Scientific Romance

My post on dystopias (24 July) sent me back to apocalyptic fiction, as I thought it would, and firstly to another re-read of Wright’s splendid A Scientific Romance.

Writers’ fascination with HG Wells is easy to understand: his two novels, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are early masterpieces of speculative fiction. Christopher Priest wove the two plots together marvellously in his tribute The Space Machine, which I also thoroughly recommend. Wright’s take is different: Wells’ machine is scheduled to re-appear at the end of 1999 and does so, and is taken possession of by another traveller who ventures five centuries into the future…

The novel was written in 1998; the threat of BSE and CJD as well as HIV (don’t medics and scientists love acronyms!) inform Wright’s future, as well as the effects of climate change; civilisation apparently collapsed in the mid 2040s; after a melancholy exploration of the remains of the land, he comes across a small group of survivors clustered together, clinging on to the remains of civilisation on the shores of Loch Ness…

One could, uncharitably, argue that there’s nothing original here: he’s lifted the concept from Wells, and imitated 19th century apocalypses like Mary Shelley‘s The Last Man and Richard Jefferies‘ After London, or MP Shiel‘s The Purple Cloud (and re-visiting this one is next on my list), and Wright acknowledges these in his notes. And yet, it’s a stunningly good novel – first novel – which won awards when first published.

It’s framed well, by an expired love triangle remembered with fondness by one of the members addressing the others; it’s erudite, abounding in references to texts from the past as he writes about our vanished present which has become a lost past in the year 2501; it’s for our times not the 1820s or 1880s or 1900s: it gains n some of its power from the aspects of our very own lives that we can see becoming our nemesis in the near future. For a genre that often leaves characterisation very thin, Wright does well: his central characters do come to life and haunt us. I think in my league table he comes pretty close to A Canticle for Leibowitz.