There’s Strange Comfort in Plague Fiction

A few weeks ago, beset by flu, my partner Athena was forced to take a few days off work. During her time at home, she decided it was finally time to read Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Partway through the book, which follows the aftermath and effects of a global pandemic, she set the book down and said, through her congestion, “I can’t decide if this is the best time to be reading this, or the worst time.”

This was less than a month ago, an age she and I are starting to think of as the Time Before. COVID-19 was — from our Vancouver Island bubble — little more than a passing item on the news, almost unthinkably remote.

In retrospect, and perhaps counterintuitively, it was very nearly the perfect time to read Station Eleven.

The novel begins in the last days of Mandel’s fictional Time Before. On a snowy night in Toronto, an actor playing King Lear at the Elgin Theatre collapses mid-performance. Jeevan, a former paparazzo, now a paramedic in training, leaps from the audience to attempt to save the actor. He is unsuccessful. On his snowy walk home, he receives a call from a friend, an emergency room doctor, who has chilling news: the Georgia flu, a particularly lethal strain of influenza, has arrived in Canada via flights from Moscow. The leap, from media distance to dangerous proximity, has happened in a matter of hours.

And — with little warning — the world as we know it begins to end.

Since beginning our social distancing, Athena and I have been taking daily walks. We schedule these sojourns for quieter times of day, and we practice extreme measures: spotting another person, or especially a crowd of people, even half a block away is enough to cause us to scurry for safe distance, either off the sidewalk entirely or into a recessed doorway. We keep hand sanitizer at the ready on the off chance we come into contact with something. Anything.

These measures have become almost unnecessary in the past few days. Downtown Victoria is largely deserted, no matter what time of day we go out. Storefronts are shuttered, and along one stretch of the city’s “main street” — Government Street — every business posted a sign in their windows, stating that not only are they closed, but they have removed all merchandise and anything of value to an off-site location.

Starbucks, the Bay, all the pubs, all the tourist shops are closed.

The Inner Harbour is particularly eerie. The first time we made it that far since the Time Before, we both paused for a moment to take in what we were seeing. Where the sidewalks would normally be crowded, even on the quietest of days, there is not another person in sight. The cruise ship season has been postponed, and there are no buskers, no vendors along the water, no whale watching tours departing. Just boats, moored, bobbing on the waves.

I notice something I have never noticed before: I can hear the water. I can hear the ocean. I can hear the play of the waves on the hulls of the boats.

We decided, on our way home, that we should probably pick up a few more groceries; there’s no telling when we’ll be out again.

Mandel, who was raised on Denman Island, doesn’t spend a lot of time on the science of virology in Station Eleven. The Georgia flu is shockingly virulent, and anecdotal accounts are more chilling than the precise vagary of numbers. “It’s the fastest incubation period I’ve ever seen,” the emergency room doctor who calls Jeevan says. “I just saw a patient, she works as an orderly here at the hospital, on duty when the first patients started coming in this morning. She started feeling sick a few hours into her shift, went home early, her boyfriend drove her back in two hours ago and now she’s on a ventilator. You get exposed to this, you’re sick within hours.”

Who would have thought that six years after the novel’s publication the public would have become so comfortable discussing reproduction numbers and serial intervals, vectoring and exponential growth, and mortality rates?

There is a strange comfort in the opening pages of Station Eleven: the Georgia flu is far more devastating than COVID-19. The same is true of Captain Trips, the superflu in Stephen King’s plague-opus The Stand, which is almost unimaginably virulent. As King himself tweeted, “No, coronavirus is NOT like THE STAND. It’s not anywhere near as serious. It’s eminently survivable. Keep calm and take all reasonable precautions.”

And at least the pandemic isn’t accompanied by a rise in genetically engineered super-vampires, as it is in Justin Cronin’s The Passage.

These days, we find our comfort where we can.

In the history of plague literature, themes start to emerge; key among them are those of isolation and societal breakdown. In The Plague, Albert Camus seems to capture the tenor of our times. “In spite of such unusual sights our townsfolk apparently found it hard to grasp what was happening to them. There were some feelings all could share, such as fear and separation, but personal interests, too, continued to occupy the foreground of their thoughts. Nobody as yet had really acknowledged to himself what the disease connoted.”

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, one of the foundational works of the western canon, is framed by the sequestration of 10 people in a villa during the Black Death, telling one another stories to pass the time. The Stand takes societal breakdown to horrific extremes (as one might expect from King).

There is a comfort here, as well (though I wouldn’t recommend reading or re-reading The Stand right now; the scene in New York’s Lincoln Tunnel alone is probably enough, in our current state, to induce panic).

Plague fiction allows us a sense of community, of continuity. We have, as a species, been here before. But fiction also allows us to imagine — and, if well-written enough, to participate in vicariously — the very worst. We witness, from the relative safety of our reading chairs, the collapse of western society. Our breath catches in our throats with the intimate losses suffered by the characters, and we ache along with them at the desperate lengths they have gone in order to survive. We celebrate their small victories, and mourn their despairs.

Plague fiction, like the best fiction, balances delicately between being safely removed from the situation (it’s just a book) and a complete immersion in the terror. As a result, it serves as a palliative: we can work through our own fears safely between the covers.

And perhaps the greatest strength of plague fiction is that it allows us to imagine ourselves as survivors. Because how else can the story — our story — go on?

“It just shows you,” Athena said, on the first morning of our social distancing, “how precarious everything is.”

The bulk of Station Eleven takes place two decades after the pandemic. Society has crumbled, and begun to regroup. If one has any awareness of human nature whatsoever, it won’t be surprising to learn that it is a time of harsh dichotomies: peaceful small villages and roving gangs, egalitarianism and cults of worship, peaceful communities and the ongoing shadow of violence.

Navigating between these dichotomies is the Travelling Symphony, a ragtag group of musicians and actors bringing art and music to a world scorched by the virus.

Written on the side of their wagon, and tattooed on a character’s arm, is the phrase “Survival is insufficient.” The line is cribbed from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, a relic of the Time Before, imagining a future far different from that of Station Eleven, but its truth resonates: Family survives. Community survives. Art and music survive.

We survive. And we build again.

What are you reading during the pandemic? Tell us in a comment below.