The Infection and the Antidote
When COVID-19 was beginning to spread in North America a few weeks back, when lists of books and films about viruses and plagues were going around as a way of coping with the news, I kept thinking about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It’s the only pandemic-adjacent literature I’ve been interested in revisiting (no shade to Station Eleven or Severance or any of those blockbuster medical disaster movies I’ve never seen), so I started rereading it this week, our third week of physical distancing and staying at home.
In Doomsday Book, an Oxford historian named Kivrin time-travels from 2054 to what is supposed to be 1320 in order to learn firsthand about life in the Middle Ages. Almost as soon as she arrives at her destination, fully inoculated against every known disease, she exhibits symptoms of a nasty flu, before she’s even exposed to anyone or anything that might infect her. She’s taken to a village and gradually recovers there. Soon after the villagers become ill, but with a totally different disease.
Meanwhile, back in 2054, one of the technicians involved in Kivrin’s trip also becomes ill, and Oxford is put under quarantine. The authorities attempt contact tracing, but it quickly becomes impossible to track down everyone exposed. There is a long and — more so now than ever — painful time between the reader understanding the situation and the characters realizing they’ve been exposed to a mysterious and dangerous infectious disease. Interwoven with this are scenes with Kivrin, a woman alone sometime in the 14th century, suffering the same symptoms as the technician back in the 21st century, trying to figure out where and when exactly she is and wondering why she feels so bad. The tension is extreme and makes for a very propulsive read.
I’m still in the process of rereading the book, and I don’t remember all the details, so I won’t spoil it for either of us, but I’m very much enjoying diving back into Connie Willis’s world, regardless of how much it does or doesn’t keep my mind off our current pandemic.
Jill Lepore in the New Yorker considers what it means to read fiction about pandemics: “[T]he existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is also — in its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plague — an antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite.”
I suppose I’m reading Doomsday Book, of all possible novels, at this particular moment, for the same reason I read anything. It provides a distraction, to some degree, but it also provides a lens through which to see the real world. During a pandemic and during the regular drudgery of everyday life, fiction provides the same solace, the same caution, the same escape as it always has.