Pandemic

A more topical novel can hardly be imagined, but it is actually mere coincidence that Emma Donoghue’s latest novel is set during the 1918 (“Spanish Flu”) influenza pandemic. She started writing it in October 2018, “inspired by the centenary of the great flu of 1918”. Of course, just months later, Covid-19 swept across the world, and the interest in pandemics skyrocketed.

It’s not just its timeliness that sets The Pull of our Stars apart, however. It is simply an excellent novel.

The spectre had a dozen names: the great flu, khaki flu, blue flu, black flu, the grippe, or the grip…[…] The malady, some called it euphemistically. Or the war sickness, on the assumption that it must somehow be a side effect of four years of slaughter.

Set in Donoghue’s native Dublin, the opening pages powerfully describe a city sinking under the epidemic.

So many shops shuttered now due to staff being laid low by the grippe. […]Dublin was a great mouth holed with missing teeth.

[…]

Three hearses in a row outside an undertaker’s, the horses already in harness for the morning’s first burials. Two aproned men shouldered a load of pale planks down the lane to the back — for building more coffins, I realised.

Julia Power is lucky enough to have survived the flu unscathed. She is a nurse in the Maternity/Fever ward:

Not a proper ward, just a supply room converted last month when it became clear to our superiors that not only were expectant women catching this grippe in alarmingly high numbers, but it was particularly hazardous to them and their babies.

Staff are falling sick too: “There were so few of us still on our feet and reporting for duty that the breakfast queue was short.”. Julia, by default, is in charge of the ward, and has only one helper, Bridie Sweeney, a completely untrained volunteer. There are 3 beds, occupied over the 3 days of the novel by 6 women in various stages of advanced pregnancy.

Donoghue’s descripton of the medical details are superbly done: they seem thoroughly well researched with no historical inaccuracies (not that I’m any kind of expert).. More than that, the fascinating medical, socio-cultural and historical details are woven smoothly into the novel as Julia goes about her day.

Could she be hungry for her breakfast? Unlikely, in her state: patients with serious flu cases had no appetite. Haggard at thirty-three years old, pale but for those flame-red cheeks, her belly a hard hill. Eleven previous deliveries, it said on Ita Noonan’s chart, seven children still living; and this twelfth birth not expected for another two and a half months. (Since Mrs. Noonan had been able to tell us nothing about when she might have conceived or when she’d felt the quickening, Sister Finnigan had had to make a stab at the due date based on the height of the uterus.)

Over the course of the novel, Julia and Bridie deal with a stillbirth, a seventeen-year-old having her first baby (who has no idea when her last period was, and who thinks the baby will emerge from her belly button), the dazed mother of seven (above), and a woman who lives in a nunnery in servitude for the crime of her pregnancy. Bridie, too, is the product of a church orphanage, and works fulltime in the nunnery for no pay. The power of the church is immense:

‘Any Catholic born in this hospital comes under Father Xavier’s aegis.’

I found myself wondering who’d put us all in the hands of these old men in the first place.

Two doctors appear occasionally: Dr MacAuliffe (‘my heart sank. He looked no more than twenty-five. These inexperienced doctors rarely knew one end of a woman from another’) and the intriguing Dr Lynn — a woman! And if her femaleness were not odd enough, she is ‘a vicar’s daughter from Mayo gone astray — a socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand!’

‘Improbably lurid,’ thinks Julia, and so did I. But no, every character in this novel is fictional except for Dr. Lynn! (as per the author’s note at the end of the book).

The influenza epidemic might be foremost, but World War I is also on, and just as much in the public consciousness. Julia’s brother has returned from the trenches and does not speak at all, and most of the orderlies in the hospital are injured veterans. Closer to home, Sinn Fein is pushing for home rule in Ireland.

Chock full of historical detail, the novel still never feels as if the author is trying to show off her research. Each character has personality and a backstory that are related to their medical history, and that emerge naturally over the course of their days.

Given the malnutrition (‘every baby seemed to cost these inner-city women a handful of teeth’) and early and frequent childbearing, it surprised me that infant mortality in Dublin at the time was just 15%. But the death rate for ‘illegitimates’, said Dr Lynn, was ‘several times higher’. And the babies had ‘less chance of surviving their first year than a man in the trenches’.

It is inevitable that readers will look for similarities and differences to the Covid-19 situation. Does this not take you back to early 2019?

I noticed just one headline about the flu today, low down on the right: Increase in Reports of Influenza. A masterpiece of understatement, as if it were only the reporting that had increased, or perhaps the pandemic was a figment of the collective imagination. I wondered whether it was the newspaper publisher’s decision to play down the danger or if he’d received orders from above.

Scattered through the novel are text from posters in the city and hospital. Some are quaint:

Eat an onion a day to keep illness at bay.

Defeatists are the allies of disease.

and some are still completely appropriate:

If in doubt, don’t stir out.

Refrain from shaking hands, laughing or chatting closely together.