BEST BOOKS ON... THE END OF QUARANTINE

LIKE so many, I am both desperate to leave quarantine and scared to do so; keen for my children to return to school, but anxious.

There has been a lot of talk of novels such as Stephen King’s The Stand and Albert Camus’s The Plague re-entering the bestsellers charts. As a lockdown literary project, some have read Daniel Defoe’s A Journal Of The Plague Year, the writer’s evocation of 1665 London. (Take with a pinch of salt the claim that it was an eyewitness testament. Defoe was just five in that year.)

My initial instinct was to shun such reading, thinking it at best ghoulish and at worst hysteria-fanning to take to my bed with books recounting bubonic buboes. Also, I don’t need a lockdown project — I have home-schooling, plus extra housekeeping. I’ve never had less time.

But then I picked up the Camus and was sufficiently gripped that I read the Defoe, too. Both fascinated for the parallels with our own viral times: the Government’s slowness to act; the rich fleeing, the poorest bearing the brunt of the disease; non-compliant boozers and sanctimonious hypocrites.

I then revisited Geraldine Brooks’s compelling historical novel Year Of Wonders, set in the real ‘Plague village’ of Eyam, Derbyshire, which with the arrival of disease in the spring of 1666 took the selfless decision to self-isolate.

And then I turned to Emily St John Mandel’s mesmerising Station Eleven, which vividly imagines a flu that wipes out much of the world’s population. Most of the novel is set a generation later, with a touring band of actor-musicians trying to resurrect the best of what was lost.

These are all accounts of terrible loss but also of hope, renewal and occasional heroism. Even Camus’s existentialist The Plague ends to the sounds of music and jubilant cries, as its protagonist Dr Rieux concludes: ‘One learns in the midst of such tribulations... that there is more in men to admire than despise.’

We are still in the middle of terrible tribulations but we will celebrate on the streets again. These books show us that this, too, will pass.