This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love. [p. 137]
I'd enjoyed Walker's The Age of Miracles, so had good expectations of her second novel. I don't think I knew that it was a pandemic novel: and technically it's not, because it was published in 2019. But it is spookily prescient, with conspiracy theories, refusal of vaccines and masks, blaming of outsiders ...
At a university campus in California, a student falls asleep and can't be woken. The sickness spreads; the inhabitants are told to avoid contact with others; the army sets up roadblocks to prevent anyone leaving town. And it turns out that the sleepers are dreaming, furiously dreaming: 'there is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain — awake or asleep' [p. 60].
Walker's cast includes a survivalist father and his two young daughters; their next-door neighbours, who have a small baby who's feeding on donor milk and could have been exposed to the virus; an ageing college professor whose lover is slowly dying in a care home; a psychiatrist, quarantined in the hospital and worrying about her daughter; and Mei, the roommate of the first student to die, whose shyness has prevented her from making friends with the other girls in her dorm. Each of them deals -- or fails to deal -- with the crisis in different ways. And each of them suffers loss.
There's a distinctly SFnal element to the story: the dreams -- perhaps prescient, perhaps creating whole realities -- experienced by those who've succumbed and fallen asleep. Walker's focus is, instead, on survival mechanisms, on the ways in which people push back against quarantine and lockdown, and on the small acts of kindness or selfishness which shape the world. Like The Age of Miracles, it doesn't really finish: it fades. But that openendedness fits the premise better than any definite resolution would.
It was unsettling to read this account of a pandemic, albeit a localised one, and see how accurately Walker's fiction predicted some aspects of the Covid pandemic. But this is, mostly, a kinder virus. "...how much quieter that ending would be, a whole world drowned in sleep, than all the other ways we have to fall." [p. 284]
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