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Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

With her latest novel, Due Preparations for the Plague, Janette Turner Hospital has crafted a testament of loss and despair, an artful narrative that blurs the boundaries between popular and literary fiction.

Lowell Hawthorne lost his mother on a hijacked airliner, flying from Paris to New York, when he was a teenager. Thirteen years later, Lowell is a divorced parent, plagued by dreams of shocking violence and badgered by harried telephone calls from Samantha, a young student in Washington, D.C. Samantha was aboard Air France 64, one of a group of children released before the terrorists blew up the aircraft on a remote tarmac in Iraq, an explosion that killed both of her parents and her infant brother. Samantha pursues the truth about AF64 obsessively, filing freedom of information requests, harassing politicians, and maintaining contact with the other child survivors of the flight, who have come to refer to themselves as Phoenixes, born of the flames.

After his father is killed in a mysterious car accident (the same sort of accident that is claiming the lives of a number of the Phoenixes), Lowell is visited by the psychiatrist who was treating the elder Hawthorne. He presents Lowell with a bag of files and videotapes, the truth of what happened on Air France 64, as compiled by Lowell’s father, an intelligence operative who may have been responsible for the tragedy. Lowell quickly comes to realize that he is not safe, and that there are people willing to kill him to keep the truth a secret.

While this sounds like the set-up for a routine thriller, there is nothing pedestrian or predictable about Due Preparations for the Plague. Turner Hospital uses standard genre narrative elements as a hook on which to hang a stirring exploration of guilt and redemption, of loss and death.

Due Preparations for the Plague looks back to the terrorism of the 1970s and ’80s, and gains power from the reader’s awareness of the events of Sept. 11. Politics and history never take precedence, however. The novel is firmly rooted in Turner Hospital’s skillfully crafted characters. Even enigmatic figures like Sirocco (“the desert wind that scorches where it blows”), the key figure behind the terrorist attack, and Salamander, an American spy master, are carefully shaded and free of cliché. Turner Hospital generates considerable suspense in several timelines without losing sight of the humanity that transcends mere characterization.

The novel is a multifaceted, multilayered examination of a terrorist attack, from the terrorists to their innocent victims, from the cool precision of a lecture hall to the frantic heat of chemical weapons and death.

The language demonstrates Turner Hospital’s considerable gifts – carefully honed and balanced, at once clinical and passionate. There are moments of sheer beauty in the midst of almost unimaginable horror and violence, passages almost operatic in their haunting purity. This is not naturalistic writing (in places far from it), but the power and audacity of Turner Hospital’s narrative spell defuses any objections to the beauty of the language.

Due Preparations for the Plague is a stark, haunting portrait of humanity stripped bare, at its most base and its most elevated, a reminder of the horrors around us we that we have come to take for granted, and of our indomitable power in the face of them.

 

Reviewer: Robert Wiersema

Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 398 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-00-714927-1

Issue Date: 2003-8

Categories: Fiction: Novels