Andrés Vaccari

Due Preparations for the Plague (2003)
By Janette Turner Hospital

When the dust from the events of 9/11 finally settles, this may be remembered as the best novel dealing with the day that set the mood for the twenty-first century.

The year is 1987. A group of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists hijack an aircraft bound for New York from Paris. They threaten to kill everyone on board with toxic nerve gas unless a number of their fellow freedom fighters are released from prisons across Europe and the USA. In an act of benevolence, the hijackers let the children go. But when their demands are not met, they fly the plane to Iraq and blow it up, killing all passengers.

At least, this is the official story. Lowell Hawthorne was sixteen years old when he lost his mother to that fateful flight. A few days short of the thirteenth anniversary of the disaster, his father, an American secret service agent, dies in mysterious circumstances, and it becomes clear to Lowell that there is a lot more to the hijacking than what the media and the government have made public. Haunted by the event, unable to lead a normal life, Lowell has always tried to forget it, to bury it deep within himself.

On the other hand, Samantha Raleigh, one of the children who got away from the plane, is obsessed with finding out the truth about what happened. A mysterious legacy from Lowell’s father (a bag containing top secret dossiers and video tapes) brings these two damaged lives together. But as they try to unearth the truth, they realize they’re being closely watched, and that powerful and covert forces will go to any lengths to stop them.

Although this novel has all the makings of a bestseller (espionage, intrigue, conspiracy, a fast and edgy pace), interestingly it was not one. Perhaps the horror Turner Hospital describes is too real, and the possibilities she suggests too horrific to contemplate in these fragile times. Better watch CSI and see the just and unfailing forces of the law catching the baddies and restoring the moral order. Turner Hospital depicts the US government as a knowing accomplice in the atrocities, which are justified in terms of an ill-defined ‘national interest’ and engineered with the utmost contempt for human life. She submerges us into the lives of the survivors, the aftermath of trauma with its painful minutiae of physical symptoms and tortuous psychological machinations. She examines the event from the perspective of both the victims and the perpetrators, also offering an insightful portrayal of the ideologies and mechanics of covert government operations. The heavy mood of anguish and paranoia is almost unbearable at times.

The plague, although a symbol of modern chemical warfare, also refers metaphorically to the web of terror and deceit engineered by supposedly democratic nations, in complicity with terrorists. It is clear that Turner Hospital intends this as a thinly veiled allegory on 9/11. She also weaves into the narrative another two famous literary meditations on times of plague: Camus’ The Plague, and Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.

And as if all this was not enough, this consummate novelist manages to also offer a meditation on the responsibility of art in times of pestilence. “Even out of atrocity,” one of the characters writes, “one is stirred to make art. Especially out of atrocity. One feels impelled to transform it.” This book does just that.