Meanwhile, a doctor friend of Jeevan warns him just in time of the pandemic’s arrival, and he holes up in his brother Frank’s high-rise flat with trolley loads of bottled water and non-perishables.
His action though will become a touchstone moment for the youngest actress in the cast. Jeevan leaps into action, but Arthur Leander will die later, and once the doctors arrive, Jeevan doesn’t hang around to be thanked. Jeevan, a trainee paramedic, is watching a performance of King Lear when the celebrated lead actor has a heart attack on the stage of the Montreal theatre. The book starts just as the virus is arriving in North America. This is precisely what happens in this novel, where a new strain of flu erupts over the Earth resulting in 99% mortality within about a week. Flu is very infectious, and can be transmitted via aerosols in the air from coughs and sneezes – and could so easily be flown from one continent to another on an aeroplane. This strain of the H1N1 virus came from birds, via pigs to humans, starting in France. Ebola, however, is small beer compared with the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which infected half a billion people, killing 3-5% of the world’s entire population. We may be in the middle of the biggest epidemic yet seen of Ebola in Africa, but treatments are beginning to come online and stricter control measures will surely begin to rein its spread in. This book may have shocking pink endpapers, but between them is the most elegant novel of speculative fiction that I’ve read in a long time – and dystopian tales count amongst my very favourites.
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