21 March/22 March 2020 ★ FT Weekend 7O
n Radio 4’sToday pro-
gramme last week, the
novelist Kamila Shamsie
urged coronavirus prep-
pers facing potential self-
isolation to “clear out their nearest inde-
pendent bookshops as well as the spa-
ghetti aisles”.
Shamsie said she would be stockpiling
books that offered a distraction from
the pandemic (Stella Gibbons’Cold Com-
fort Farm nd Hilary Mantel’sa The Mirror
and the Light ere top of her list, thoughw
Mantel’s passing references to the
“sweating sickness” might not be espe-
cially comforting to some).
Not all readers are seeking escapism
from Covid-19, however. In Italy and
France, sales of Albert Camus’sThe
Plague, which describes an outbreak of
“pestilence” in the Algerian town of
Oran, and José Saramago’sBlindness,
about a mysterious epidemic of sight
loss in an anonymous city, have soared
in the past few weeks. Meanwhile, epi-
demic-themed reading lists have been
circulating on social media.
From Boccaccio’sDecameron, with its
framing narrative about a group of
Florentines exiled by plague to the Tus-
can hills, to Stephen King’sThe Stand, in
which a mysterious illness called “Cap-
tain Trips” kills 99 per cent of humanity,
infectious disease has always been an
attractive subject for writers, especially
novelists. What, if anything, can their
works teach us about thepandemic?
The close affinity between infection
and fiction is evident in one of the earli-
est English novels: Daniel Defoe’sA Jour-
nal of the Plague Year. First published in
1722, it was written to capitalise on the
hysteria caused by an outbreak of
plague in Marseille in 1720 (which
petered out before the book was pub-
lished: Defoe’s novel was a commercial
failure). Part adventure story, part
social commentary, part survivalist
instruction manual,A Journal of the
Plague Year s a strange hybrid that feelsi
as though it has itself been infected by
many other literary genres. LikeRobin-
son Crusoe, it stressed its authenticity on
its title page: this was not a work of fic-
tion but a collection of “observations or
memorials of the most remarkable
occurrences, as well public as private,
which happened in London during the
last great visitation in 1665”.
Though repetitive and rambling,A
Journal of the Plague Year s a wonderfullyi
vivid account of a city under siege from
disease. Defoe, who was five years old in
1665, based much of his account on the
experiences of his uncle, Henry Foe
(who also lent his initials to the book’s
narrator), and the journal does have the
feel of an eyewitness account. HF
describes the gradual onset of the
plague: first as rumour, then as weekly
lists of the dead, and finally as bodies
piling up in plague pits.
Soon people are self-isolating or flee-
ing the city. Distrust is rife: the doors of
households suspected of harbouring
plague are marked with red crosses,
while shopkeepers disinfect money by
dunking it in vinegar and fumigating it
with burning gunpowder.
Reading the journal now is an eerie
experience, not least because so manysigns of this ancient communion in a 10-
word dispatch, all written in capitals.”
Isolated from their loved ones and una-
ble to speak their minds, people are
forced to communicate in clichés.
“Before long,” Camus writes, “whole
lives together or painful passions were
reduced to a periodic exchange of stock
phrases such as ‘Am well’, ‘Thinking of
you’, ‘Affectionately yours’”. For Camus,
plague, like fascism, wasn’t just a threat
to life, but to intimacy, language and
companionship.
Infection was always a hallmark of
gothic fiction (think of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, who transmits his condition
with a bite), but during the latter half of
the 20th century, pandemic literature
became for the most part the province
of sci-fi and speculative fiction. Genre
novelists from HG Wells (War of the
Worlds) to Michael Crichton (The
Andromeda Strain) have revisited conta-
gious disease to reflect on the fragility of
humanity (and, in the case of Wells, our
resilience: it’s the aliens who are killed
by a novel virus).
Often these authors use pandemics to
write about other, even more invisible
threats. In the endless stream of zombie
novels and films produced since George
Romero’sNight of the Living Dead, conta-
gion has represented everything from
the mindless consumerism of late capi-
talism (all those scenes set in shopping
malls), to the HIV crisis, to, in Colson
Whitehead’sZone One, the unthinking
prejudice of racism.
One of the most successful zombie
novels of recent years, Max Brooks’s
World War Z which, much like Defoe’s(
Journal, is presented not as a novel but as
a collection of found documents: dia-
ries, medical reports, military dis-
patches), made the link between zom-
bie fiction and the Aids crisis reduc-
tively explicit. “Like Aids, they’re very
easy to stop,” Brooks said in an inter-
view, “and with the right clear-headed
leadership, they could be wiped out
before ever becoming a threat.”
There are always, therefore, other
anxieties lurking behind our fascination
with stories about epidemics. The phi-
losopher Timothy Morton has used the
term “hyperobject” to describe entities
so enormous they resist any attempt to
represent them. Examples of hyperob-
jects include substances (microplastics
and radioactive plutonium) but also
phenomena, such as climate change,
which cannot easily be reduced to nar-
rative forms. The novelist Amitav
Ghosh has argued that the existential
threat of climate change has been rela-
tively under-represented in fiction pre-
cisely because it is “unthinkable” in this
way. The challenges it poses, he
observed in his insightful eco-critical
studyThe Great Derangement, are aes-
thetic as well as ethical and behavioural.
One reason for the perennial popular-
ity of novels about contagion is that,
despite the bleakness of their subject
matter, they are often comforting. Most
fictional representations of infectious
diseases are first-person stories of sur-
vival: their appeal is that, at least while
you read them, you are placed on the
side of the living. But perhaps the main
reason we are so fascinated by what you
might call “epidemi-lit” is that it makes
abstract things — climate anxiety, fear
of nuclear annihilation, existential
dread at the meaninglessness of life —
feel real. “A pestilence,” wrote Camus in
The Plague, “does not have human
dimensions, so people tell themselves
that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream
which will end.” It might be that we
enjoy reading novels about contagion
because they offer us ways of thinking
about all the other, ungraspable terrors
that keep us awake at night, terrors
which only become more frightening
when they cannot be written down.Chronicles of a plague
Essay The affinity of fiction and infection stretches from Defoe to zombie horror, with themes of|
adventure, social commentary and survivalist instruction coming together at times of crisis. ByJon Day
Contagion has represented
everything from mindlessconsumerism to the HIV
crisis to racismof HF’s passing concerns feel remarka-
bly familiar. Defoe is particularly acute
on news and misinformation. “We had
no such thing as printed News Papers in
those Days,” HF says, ruefully, at one
point, “to spread Rumours and Reports
of Things, and to improve them by the
Invention of Men, as I have liv’d to see
practis’d since.” One wonders what he
would have made of Twitter.
A Journal of the Plague Year stablishede
many of the tropes we now associate
with the genre: a creeping sense of dread
and paranoia measured out statistically
in charts and lists; the distrust and soci-
etal breakdown that accompanies the
pandemic; the contrast between conta-
gion as an abstraction and as a human
reality, embodied by the image of a lone
figure walking through a deserted city-
scape that is such a mainstay of dysto-
pian fiction. There are beautiful
moments of intimacy within the dark-
ness too, as when HF has a shouted con-
versation with a waterman rowing down
the Thames, or when he recounts the
story of a group of Londoners who flee
the city to establish a utopian commu-Illustration by Cat O’NeilI
thought I had 2020 covered with
a simple resolution: travel more,
especially outside India. This was
going to be the year when I joined
a friend walking across Myanmar
and Vietnam, when I finally organised
that Silk Route drive with three equally
Jeep-mad women writers, when I
made it to New York, Lombardy and
Barcelona for assorted weddings. As is
the case in much of the world, those
plans are now on indefinite hold.
All of us, stranded, locked down or
social distancing out of consideration,
now face uncertainty about our future
travels. On a planet where your fellow
human beings arepossible carriers of
contagion, what happens to the jet-
setter, the indefatigable conferencer,
the backpacker, the pilgrim — even that
ubiquitous breed, the Instagrammer?
Yet for travel lovers stuck at home,
reading about places and journeys that
are presently out of reach can provide
unexpected pleasure and solace.
As Delhi began a slow shutdown of
outdoor spaces, gyms, restaurants and
protest sites, I made a short list of
countries I’d never visited, from
Australia to Japan to Zimbabwe, and
promised myself I’d start the journey
by reading fiction, histories and
favourite children’s books from each.
With a sense that reading in another
century might be an escape from the
troubles of our own, I started my
round-the-world trip with the 17th-
century haiku poet Matsuo Basho’s
travel classicThe Narrow Road to theDeep North. In it, Basho chronicled the
sometimes perilous, sometimes
pleasurable journey he took across
Japan in the spring of 1689.
A few pages in, and my heart sank.
“The gods seemed to have possessed
my soul and turned it inside out, and
roadside images seemed to invite me
from every corner, so that it was
impossible for me to stay idle at
home... I was already dreaming of
the full moon rising over the islands
of Matsushima.”
Such a great yearning rose up in me
for all the places I’d never visited that
I almost abandoned poor Basho. But I
read on, and soon I was reminded of
the often challenging realities of being
on the road, as the author lamented:
“How far must I walk/To the village ofKasajima/This endlessly muddy
road/Of the early wet season?”
If Basho weathered mishaps
(including having a horse urinate
on his pillow at one resting point),
Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century
Moroccan who began travelling at the
age of 21 and finally returned home
29 years and about 40 nations later,
was abducted by bandits, and lost his
ships.The Travels of Ibn Battuta ointsp
to other perils — his worst months were
spent in the service of a capricious
sultan, who had those who displeased
him trampled by elephants, a fate Ibn
Battuta narrowly avoided.
Leaving behind the medieval world, I
returned toclassics closer to our time
— revisiting, after years, such wonders
as Barry Lopez’sArctic Dreams 1986),(
William Dalrymple’s Delhi travelogue
City of Djinns 1993), Robyn Davidson’s(
Tracks, about her solo journey across
the Australian desert in 1977, and Jan
Morris’sThe World of Venice, from 1960,
capturing the “city of redemption”
before it was overrun by tourists. A few
days and about five books in, I felt
considerably happier. The planet felt
vast and filled with possibilities again.
It will wait until we can revisit it, with
more care, perhaps, and more attention
to the marvel of travel itself.
The present is as rich with treasures
as the medieval world or the recent
past. Among books published this
month, Louise Erdrich’sThe Night
Watchman ictionalises the journey off
her uncle, a tribal leader who travellednity deep in Epping Forest. The 1665
outbreak of plague was one of the last
in Britain, and after the 18th century,
novelists became more interested
in contagion as metaphor than as
documentary reality. Mary Shelley’s
dystopian novelThe Last Man, published
eight years afterFrankenstein, used a
pandemic to think about the limits of
medical science, the imagination and
Romanticism.
Set in 2074, which feels very much
like the 1826 in which it was written, it
describes Europe ravaged by a plague-
like disease (Shelley might have been
inspired by a cholera outbreak that was
then raging in Calcutta). Lionel Verney,
the titular “last man” (and a stand-in for
Shelley herself) gradually loses all of his
friends, and at the end of the novel only
a small band of survivors is left to try to
remake the world.
It is striking that the last major histor-
ical global epidemic — the 1918 outbreak
of “Spanish flu” — went almost unregis-
tered by novelists, possibly because the
tragedy of the first world war seemed to
offer them a bigger subject, possiblybecause the literary modernism then on
the ascendant had more to say about
interior than exterior turmoil. In much
20th-century contagion literature, dis-
ease was represented in an allegorical
rather than realist manner. Camus
maintained that the pestilence
described inThe Plague as a metaphorw
for fascism (a position that drew criti-
cism from those who saw this as a way of
abnegating collaborators of their moral
responsibility), but his novel is never-
theless a compelling study of exile and
isolation set against a backdrop of epi-
demiological collapse.
It’s also a novel about communica-
tion, one that feels particularly apt in a
time of social isolation. As the town of
Oran is cut off from the wider world,
language itself comes under strain. Let-
ters are banned to prevent the spread of
infection. Then intercity telephone calls
are forbidden, as they cause overcrowd-
ing in phone booths. Telegrams become
the only means of communication with
the outside world: “Creatures bound
together by mutual sympathy, by flesh
and heart, were reduced to finding theThe planet
on a page
Nilanjana Roy
Reading the world
from North Dakota to Washington in
1953 to try to fight against the
termination of his tribe. Kawai Strong
Washburn’s brilliant debut novel,
Sharks in the Time of Saviours, follows
the Flores family from Hawaii at the
time of the collapse of the sugar-cane
industry to Portland, Washington and
California and back again.
Hadley Freeman’s powerful family
storyHouse of Glass races the flight oft
her Jewish family from Chrzanow,
sister town to Auschwitz, after
pogroms in Poland, mapping both the
barbarity of humans and the survival
of the human spirit. And Matt Gaw’s
Under the Starsis an arresting account
of his growing love for darkness, a
turning away from artificial light as he
ventures from London to “Dark Sky
Communities” in Scotland and on to
the North Sea in search of moonrises
and the comfort of the natural dark.
Despite the world’s present
predicament, there’s no room for self-
pity. One of the greatest writers of the
last century, Rebecca West, spent six
weeks travelling through a fraught,
disunited Yugoslavia in 1937. In her
monumental 1941 accountBlack Lamb
and Grey Falcon, West noted: “It is not
comfortable to be an inhabitant of this
globe; it never has been, except for
brief periods.”
A mere travel lockdown suddenly
seems a small enough cross to bear,
compared with violent upheaval,
capricious sultans, civil war, brigands
and incontinent horses.TheFT Weekend Oxford Literary
Festival as been postponed dueh
to the coronavirus pandemic. Sally
Dunsmore, the festival’s director,
said that it was with a “heavy
heart” that the decision had been
taken to postpone the event, which
was due to take place from March
27 to April 5, but that it was the
“only and right thing to do”.
The organisers hope to carry
forward a good part of the planned
programme, which involved some
450 writers speaking at events
ranging from the state of UK
politics to an interactive tour of
space, at an event later this year or
in 2021, when the festival is due to
mark its 25th anniversary.
Ticket sales will be treated as
credit for future events though
Dunsmore said would-be visitors
might also consider their purchase
as a donation to a charity whose
insurance does not cover the
Yoshitoshi’s ‘Since the Crescent Moon consequences of a pandemic.
I Have Been Waiting’ (c1890)— Alam yLife under lockdown Books
MARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 17:14 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD7, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 7, 1