Dismal Reading

A 432-page dystopia would not be my preferred reading at any time let alone in these dire days. But that is what members of the book club chose at their last (online) meeting, for discussion next time. Owing to the 9-hour difference between Stockholm and the location where I am stranded, I had no say in the matter. But the next meeting is due to take place two hours later, to accommodate me.

Thus I have been struggling to get through at least a substantial part of the work, reading reluctantly in fits and starts and escaping for relief after each chapter to anything from Sherlock Homes (I hadn't read all the tales) and The Three Musketeers (I hadn't read that either) to books on photography, publishing and making soup, (all downloaded free of charge from you-know-where.) Almost to my own surprise, the one that has intrigued me most, as it would seem to contradict my distaste for the dismal, is Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year 1665.

Those were very different times when it comes to medical knowledge and resources. And there was no means of rapidly transporting people from one country and continent to another, taking the disease with them. Yet there are some remarkable similarities with the present situation. Despite all the advances of the past three-to-four centuries, knowledge of the current affliction and how to cure or prevent it is woefully weak. Then as now, there were the unscrupulous, quick to take advantage of our ignorance and fears, nowadays with a surge in cyber fraud, at that time by going around offering to sell wonder potions that were either useless or dangerous.

Then, although transport may have been very different in 1665, the first two cases Defoe mentions were Frenchmen in London. Moreover, many of the wealthier citizens left the city for the countryside, thus spreading the disease to rural areas that might have remained free of it. And while surrounding boroughs recorded alarming increases in the number of fatalities, the City of London suffered much less owing to draconian measures announced by the Lord Mayor, something of an equivalent to the lock-down of our day but very much harsher, with imprisonment for anyone who did not comply.

To some extent the measures were counter-productive as nobody was allowed to enter or leave a house where someone had contracted the disease. Such a house was watched night and day. It meant that others in the household who might have escaped the illness were condemned to stay where they were most likely to get it and according to Defoe, many died as a result.

Not pleasant reading, yet I turn to it in preference to Atwood's fictional Gilead, which I have now finally decided to abandon.

 

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