I’ve read a fair amount of pandemic fiction now. One stand out was (of course) Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, which elegantly explores a flu pandemic and the immediate aftermath on the survivors, with a good dose of Shakespeare on the side. The other stand out has been Phase Six by Jim Shepard, in which some kids unearthed a virus that had been frozen in Greenland, triggering a terrible pandemic; we follow the virus south seeing its all-encompassing progress, mainly seen from a medical point of view, done with great empathy. Another different view of post-disaster life is shown in Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo in which a disaster has caused the old to keep growing older, and the young to die young.
Which brings us to Nagamatsu’s take on a pandemic and life afterwards, published a few years ago. Told in what is effectively a sequential story cycle, each chapter told from a different point of view, but with many overlapping characters, we begin in the Arctic once more, after a killer virus has been unleashed from an ancient body unearthed in an archaeological expedition, discovered when Dr Cliff Miyashiro arrives at the research station where his daughter had worked but died.
In the second segment, we meet Skip, who wants to become a comedian, but needs a job. He gets a job at a theme park, where he’ll act a part. But ‘The City of Laughter’, is no ordinary theme park – it’s a euthanasia park for terminally ill children – this virus, as whatever happened in Tawada’s novel, goes for the young. Skip’s job is to give the children and their families the time of their lives, before strapping the child into Osiris, the mega-g ride that will first knock them out, then finish them off. What he doesn’t reckon on is falling for one of his charges, Fitch, and his mom.
A father, a research medic, who has lost his own son, growing replacement organs for children in pigs, is astounded when one of his porcine subjects develops speech in scenes reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon. The medic feels like a father to the pig. You may guess what will happen.
There are more tales, and they cleverly link together, but the novel finishes with a trip into the future, as the search for a new home planet is needed. The three sections I’ve picked out are the three that I particularly enjoyed, but the whole novel was interesting and thoughtfully written, and a great addition to pandemic lit.
Source: Borrowed from friend Fiona – thank you! Bloomsbury 2022, 304 pages.
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