All in All I Preferred Disco Fever – and I Hated Disco Fever

On this site I largely avoid overt discussion of news events or politics. There is a surfeit of sites that discuss (or more commonly rant about) little else, so my voice amid their din isn’t much missed. Besides, there is so much else about which to scribble – into which scribbles I then surreptitiously can insert my world views. Sometimes, however, a direct encounter with current events cannot be evaded. They might lasso you from the most unexpected direction. A lasso that snared me this week was tossed by E.R. Hamilton Bookseller.

Earlier this year I much enjoyed the mystery novel Icarus by South African author Deon Meyer (my brief review of it is in a February post) and decided to try something by him in another genre. This was before the border closings and the virally induced Wall Street panic of the past two weeks. I opted for his 2016 novel Fever. I never put much stock in synchronicity but Carl Jung soon had a chuckle anyway. From the brief catalogue description I knew only that Fever was a post-apocalyptic novel. (I wrote one of those myself.) It arrived in the mail and then lay on my desk for a while, but I opened it this past Monday specifically to divert myself from the news. What ends the-world-as-we-know-it in the book? The title gives a strong hint. An intensely rapidly spreading disease kills 95% of the population in a matter of months. The remaining 5% are immune, but the breakdown in civilization takes its toll on a large portion of them, too. What virus did all this? The narrator writes, “Corona viruses were quite common…In the mango tree there was a bat, with a different kind of corona virus in its blood.” Sigh.

The primary narrator (there are several others) in the novel is Nico Storm. He and his father Willem have survived the Fever and they try to re-establish a functioning community from other refugee survivors. Predatory gangs and internal divisions (politics never cease even amid an apocalypse) make it difficult. Furthermore, there are mysterious helicopters that are seen and heard on rare occasions, and they might be key to a deep secret. The characters learn that if there is anything more dangerous than humans who have shed the shackles of civilization and released their animal natures, it is civilized visionaries willing to use any means to achieve “good” ends. Thumbs Up on the book: the hate implied in the blog's title is for COVID-19.

In real life we have seen apocalyptic cults and societies who might well applaud outcomes like those in Fever, be they natural or manufactured. The doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, actively worked to produce chemical and biological weapons to bring about the end. In the US the extreme pro-environment Church of Euthanasia doesn’t advocate homicide, but it does promote suicide. (Motto: “Save the Planet: Kill Yourself.”) According to the founder Reverend Chris Korda, “the four pillars of the Church of Euthanasia are suicide, abortion, cannibalism and sodomy. The Church only has one commandment: Thou Shall Not Procreate. All four pillars help reduce the population.” Korda adds, “We're only tangentially interested in the fate of the human species, but we're most interested in the fate of the planet we happen to inhabit and dominate... so our support of those pillars is both symbolic and actual.” The church’s website used to list painless methods of suicide, but, because of civil litigation concerns, these were removed.

1918 flu epidemic

Up until very modern times, diseases repeatedly knocked back the world’s population, sometimes drastically. In his classic work Plagues and Peoples historian William H. McNeill convincingly argued that pathogens determined the fate of empires more often than arms did. (Napoleon, for example, still might have had to retreat from Russia, but he would have done so with an intact army were it not for typhus.) In the last few centuries, however, better health and medical care broke populations free of the risk of large die-backs on ancient and medieval scales. The most devastating pandemic in relatively recent times was the 1918 influenza spread around the world by returning soldiers. It killed 650,000 people in the US and 50,000,000 worldwide. Yet even these vast tolls didn’t dent national and global population totals.

COVID-19 won’t dent them either. Nor is it on track to be anything like the ‘18 flu. I’ll still try to avoid making its personal acquaintance of course. As for synchronicity, the other book that arrived in the same package as Fever was A Short History of Drunkenness by Mark Forsyth. Whether or not that foreshadows any events in my household, who is to say?

Devil Doll – Fever