BEST BOOKS ON...
COLDS AND FLU
OUR new columnist suggests novels to help with trickier times.
THESE are the danger days: when the January skies hang sagging and grey as unloved laundry and the headlines are full of a flu epidemic. At the school gate, I find myself surreptitiously examining the runny noses of my sons’ pals, for fear of a Typhoid Martin or Mary in our midst. On trains and buses, I shrink from those with sniffles.
‘Considering how common illness is . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, in her celebrated 1926 essay On Being Ill.
There are, of course, exceptions. In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven a flu pandemic brings about the end of the world as we know it. Only isolated pockets of survivors remain. Yet hope exists: ‘What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.’
In life, those moments when you are forced to succumb to fevered sleep and the administrations of others can feel purposeless. But in books, sickness always serves a purpose. In Pride And Prejudice, Jane Bennet catches a cold following a rain-soaked ride to Mr Bingley’s Netherfield.
Her sister Elizabeth rushes to nurse her and is forced into confusing proximity with the stand-offish Mr Darcy. But is he judging her, or admiring her? Or both? ‘Elizabeth could not help observing...how frequently Mr Darcy’s eyes were fixed on her...yet that he should look at her because he disliked her, was still more strange.’
Another sodden horse ride makes the eponymous heroine of Jilly Cooper’s Prudence feverish, delaying her at the Mulholland mansion. The eldest son, the formidably brilliant widower Ace, nurses her with unexpected tenderness: ‘Never in a million years would I have expected him to display such . . . gentleness and sensitivity.’
If you are lucky, being temporarily incapacitated can serve as a salutary reminder of how capable those around you are — of simple kindness...or of just putting on a wash.