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In this second volume in Louise Welsh's projected Plague Times trilogy, the author approaches the devastation inflicted on the world through the deadly virus dubbed "the Sweats" from a somewhat different perspective to that of the first book, A LOVELY WAY TO BURN. There the protagonist was a young woman who was driven through a landscape of horrors by a commitment to her dead lover to bring justice of whatever possible sort to his murderer. Given the scale of the viral catastrophe, hers might seem to be a Quixotic quest, but it was an essentially hopeful one in that it endorsed solid and continuing values in a disintegrating world.
Here, the protagonist has a simpler motive. He wants to go home to Orkney. Magnus McFall is a young standup comic whom we meet on the night of what he hopes will be his big breakthrough. Unfortunately for Magnus, it is also the night on which "the Sweats" has taken hold with a vengeance. Before the night is out, the entire headline group that he is opening for will be showing signs of the fatal virus. Magnus, one of the few who is naturally immune, will be in jail, falsely accused of rape, and sharing a cell with another "VP" - a vulnerable person, the designation for someone charged with an offence that the ordinary prison population views as heinous - a sexual criminal, a paedophile, or perhaps a bent cop.
Magnus' notions of prison have been formed by television dramas. Indeed his notions of quite a lot outside his individual experience have been similarly shaped. So he is fortunate to wind up in the same cell with Jeb Soames, a hard-eyed realist who is determined to survive if it is possible to do so. Under Jeb's constant badgering, Marcus survives the nightmare that is Pentonville as guards and prisoners succumb to the virus, all order falls away, and the few who are unaffected by the disease must cope as best they can.
Following a bloody escape from the jail, the two set off north, Magnus headed for his island, Jeb going anywhere he can as long as he can remain out of prison. Their journey is a discouraging one. Few have survived; those that have are wary, despairing, or mad. Magnus frequently regrets his pre-plague fondness for television zombie series. At length, they finally end up at a sort of quasi-religious community, headed by a vicar and an octogenarian priest. It is a tiny community of seven or so and getting smaller by the day as its members disappear or die, not of disease but evidently of sorrow.
Like the previous book in the trilogy, Welsh embeds a mystery plotline inside her dystopian nightmare. But here it is much reduced, though it still touches on the question of whether it matters that a murderer be brought to justice when so many are dying anyway. Her primary concern is with how those who have survived the viral onslaught for no particular reason manage the terms of their new existence. In this, the book reminds me of the current TV series, The Leftovers.
At this point in the developing trilogy, it is difficult to say where Welsh will head in the final volume. Will there be reconciliation, the dawn of a new and better society, or will everything decline until the human species eventually is extinguished? I can't tell, but I am anxious to find out.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, August 2015
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