Due Preparations for the Plague

By AM Sunday, October 20, 2013

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... it's common knowledge that Osama bin Laden received all his funding and his arms and ammunition from America, when he was useful against the Russians, and Saddam was funded and armed when he was useful against Iran. You know, it's just short-term expediency breeding huger long-term problems is hardly unique to American foreign policy. It happened to Ancient Rome, too. It happened to Napoleon. All those parallels I make in the novel, it's really about power, and the paranoia within power that brings about its own eventual dissolution - Janet Turner Hospital

Not since the magnetising Moris Farhi novel The Last of Days, absorbed during my prison days, have I read a novel in this genre: much of the action takes place within the confines of a plane, adding to the claustrophobic effect. My misfortune a couple of years ago was to have picked up Due Preparations for the Plague shortly after takeoff from Dublin Airport en route to Majorca and its sweltering heat.  I was not prepared.

The juncture for publication is one of the strengths of this book. At the same time it worked against the original plot. Effectively written prior to 9/11, having been started in 1999, Janette Turner Hospital felt compelled to rework elements of her work prior to publication in 2003 rather than deal with the fall out she anticipated particularly in America. Self censorship? To some extent, it must be. The spine of the narrative was a plane hijacking with devastating consequences far beyond the ‘crash site.’ The plane of course in this novel did not crash but was blown up on an Iraq runway.

Built around Lowel and Samantha who for different reasons were closely associated with doomed flight 64, the novel explores, without meandering, a number of diverse themes related to the use of ‘terrorism’ in the modern arena. Lowel’s mother died on the flight and Samantha survived but lost one of her parents. Ten hostages from the plane were taken to an encased bunker located in Iraq where they were held in special suits which protected them against a deadly nerve gas. Their choice – stay in their suits and die slowly or take the plunge, step outside the suit and die immediately. The claustrophobia is suffocating and the ability of some non combatants to stare death in the face with the aid of very little due preparation is moving.

This is confirmation that a good spy novel is a level above a good novel. The output of the spy genre seems to be better thought out in order to capture the labyrinthine world within which spooks ply their dubious trade. Occasionally, as in the case of Charles McCarry’s Last Supper, they cruise in the stratosphere of popular fiction, largely because they avoid the torturous plotting of a Ludlum novel but still manage to serve up twists. Theirs is a complex but discernible plot. The difference between enjoyable novelists and great ones can be summed up in three short words – Janette Turner Hospital

Set in September 1988, this is a spy-cum-terrorism novel. The title was to liken ‘terrorism to a plague for which there was no real means to prepare oneself’ and was drawn from a work by Daniel Defoe who lived through the Black Death in London at the age of 5. The backdrop is provided by US duplicity in its attempt to ride the tiger of Saudi inspired Islamicist violence. The CIA is ubiquitous in these things, pulling strings and manipulating. The reader is forced to wonder if the CIA did not exist the problem of global ‘terrorism’ would be much less pronounced. As the US prepares to strike Syria the haunting words of one of the book’s characters, CIA Agent Salamander, resonate eerily: ‘how do we tell a glorious victory from horror?’

Parallel with that is the bravery of ordinary human beings in the face of the terror pit they stare into as they stand tottering on the edge of the abyss and know it.

Those unable to withstand close spaces should give this one a miss. Atmospheric it most certainly is and a plane, as I found, is not the ideal place to read this type of stuff.

While characterised as a political thriller, in terms of twists the main one here is social but the reader is kept enthralled to the end, without reaching the destination they might have anticipated.

Janet Turner Hospital, 2003. Due Preparations for the Plague. Harper Collins: London. ISBN 000714928X