People's Train & the Consciousness Plague

About three days ago I finished a book I've been struggling my way through for what seems like weeks (but probably isn't). It's one I had to review for the Otago Daily Times, and I did my best to like it, but pretty much failed, as you can see from what will be the review when they publish it.

The writer is Tom (sometimes Thomas) Keneally, perhaps most famous for Schindler's List, the book that inspired the film of the same name. (Actually the book was originally called Schindler's Ark, but you won't find new editions of it with that name now.)

I've read other books by Keneally, one set in Australia and to do with priests and priesthood, and another set in the Antarctic, about explorers there who see someone from Scott's party who should have been dead long since. (It's also a murder mystery of sorts.) I enjoyed both of these.

But this latest book, The People's Train, has structural problems, or perhaps just narrative problems. It's told by two narrators: one takes up about 250 pages, the other the rest of the book. The first, a Russian exile living in Brisbane at the beginning of the 20th century, is a man focused so much on socialism and the revolution that he seems unable to connect with people, even though he has a kind of charisma about him. Unfortunately this makes him a very dull storyteller. Not that there isn't 'story' to tell; it's just somehow his approach to it is dull.

The second narrator, whom we've already met in the first part of the book, is a 30-something Australian journalist, with a taste for adventure. He joins the Russian when the latter returns to Russia in the days leading up to the Ten Days that Shook the World, and tells things from his viewpoint. However, he hero-worships the Russian, to a degree, and takes on board all the socialist/Marxist stuff that's spouted to him - spouted from every quarter. 'These Russians can certainly orate' he notes, after one particular day on which they rave on hour after hour.

The reader, for better or worse, seldom hears any of the discussions. They're all reported at secondhand. This may be a good thing. Politics isn't my greatest joy, and discussions of politics even less so. Innumerable other events are reported, however, from the grim to the violent to the vicious. Yet they're all seen through a kind of objective window, as though neither the Russian or the reporter can feel any real emotion about them. Keneally somehow manages to keep us at a distance throughout the book, and we rarely feel anything for the Russian, or even for the other characters as they struggle through difficult and tumultuous times. Only in the very last pages, when one of the characters attempts to rape a woman and is stopped by the Russian and the reporter, do we have any sense of outrage. Perhaps Keneally knows that the huge events are just too huge, and has to bring the horrors down to a personal level. Yet he's done this throughout the book, and for me, very little of it affected me.

Perhaps I've become tuned out to the emotions that are portrayed here. Or perhaps something about the book just didn't take hold and nothing it could do would please me...!

On the other hand, I happened to come across Paul Levinson's The Consciousness Plague at the library while looking in the sci-fi section for something else. Levinson's book can hardly be called sci-fi, except in the most loose sense. It's far more a detective story, with a lot of scientific stuff thrown in - the main character is a forensics man. It has two 'mysteries' on hand. The first is why people are starting to lose patches of their memory after taking a new flu antibiotic; the second is why a number of young ladies have been murdered over a period of six months or so.

The murders occupy quite a bit of the book and cross over with the scientific stuff, but for me that part of the story was left at something of a loose end. Probably as a result of reading too fast (and having too many names to keep track of) I wasn't sure that the murder side of things got thoroughly solved. On the other hand, the issue with the bacteria that's affecting people's memories is possibly the more interesting part of the story, and whether it's scientific or baloney it comes across as very well.

Perhaps the strangest thing about reading this book is that it's so close to the hype that's surrounded swine flu...

In Flew Enza

The flu has finally hit our house....though whether it's swine flu, or just ordinary flu is as yet unknown. Of course there's concern, and we're taking some precautions, but we assume that a dose of Tamiflu will knock it on the head, swine flu or not.

I think the worst thing about the whole swine flu business is that in the beginning the health authorities called it a pandemic when it wasn't. And then they decided we could all just get on with it and carry on regardless, treating it as just another flu we'd have to deal with, as we deal with flu every year.

But now they're saying, in effect, they don't really have much idea what's going on. In a Guardian article they're saying now they're surprised by the spread of the virus in the UK. Surprised? I thought this was a pandemic a few weeks back. Why would they be surprised?

I'm more surprised that Alan Hay, the head of the World Influenza Centre would say something like this: The flu surveillance community had been "caught napping" by the emergence of the swine flu outbreak as most resources were concentrated on guarding against a bird flu pandemic.

They were concentrating on a bird flu pandemic? That's so two years ago. Where have these guys been?

PS. Just got the Tamiflu tablets, and in the instruction sheet it has this to say:
Keep your Tamiflu tablets in the blister pack until it is time to take them. If you take the capsules out of blister pack they may not keep well.

I'm sure the person writing this meant that the tablets won't keep well in the sense that they won't be as effective over time. However, on first reading it read to me that the tablets, poor things, won't keep well. I thought they were supposed to make the human well!

From Panic to Pandemic

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the way people panic these days, as soon as there's the slightest hint of something out of the ordinary. (Another example is the people in the States who are buying up six months worth of food and other necessities to last them through the Recession.)
I mentioned the swine flu 'pandemic' in the post, and was rather cynical about it. Seems that we're now reaching the pandemic level - according to the World Health Organisation. But, as MacDoctor notes: Bear in mind, however, that we essentially get a pandemic of influenza every year. Although this virus is likely to be significantly more dangerous than the standard influenza virus, it is also likely to turn out more like the Hong Kong flu pandemic rather than the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. There will be some tragedies and some disruption to life - but the world will not come to an end.
MacDoctor also lists five myths about swine flu, which make useful reading:
1. You can get Swine Flu from eating pork/ham/bacon
2. If Swine Flu becomes pandemic it will kill 50 million people worldwide like in 1918
3. Swine Flu is just media hype
4. The current flu vaccine offers protection against Swine Flu
5. The antivirals have terrible side effects and will kill more people than the Swine Flu
These are an interesting mix of ideas, and MacDoctor deals sensibly with each one. By the way, MacDoctor is Dr. Jim McVeagh, who is currently working in the New Zealand public hospital system and in Accident and Medical practise. He thinks politics and health make strange, and often uncomfortable, bedfellows and that the law of unintended consequences is particularly bitter in medicine.
One other thing: an article from AAP in the paper today reports that Worldwide, seasonal flu kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people in an average year. That's far more scary than the current panic about swine flu....