All too real
Peter May’s prophetic vision of a pandemic makes for uneasy reading, writes Nick Duerden
Every writer has a discarded novel lurking somewhere in their bottom drawer. That, usually, is where it stays. Due to recent events, however, the situation is slightly different for crime writer Peter May.
In 2005, May started researching a novel set against the backdrop of a bird flu pandemic. He spent six weeks writing the book, which he would go on to call Lockdown, but it was never published. Until now.
“British editors at the time,” he writes in the book’s foreword, “thought my portrayal of London under siege by the invisible enemy of [bird flu] was unrealistic and could never happen – in spite of the fact that all my research showed that, really, it could.”
A smidgen of hubris understandably creeps into the foreword’s conclusion:
“As I write this, I’m hunkered down at home in France, forbidden to leave my house except in exceptional circumstances. Covid-19 is ravaging the world, and society as we know it is rapidly disintegrating. The parallels with Lockdown are terrifying. So this seemed like the moment to... dig out that old manuscript to share with my readers.”
As the book opens, over half a million have died and there is looting on the streets. “Shortly after midnight,” writes May in chapter three, “doctors at St Thomas’s hospital announced the death of the Prime Minister. Two of his children were already dead, and his wife was critically ill.”
Meanwhile, paranoia grips the nation. “Across the room there was a loud sneeze, and all heads turned... Everyone was hypersensitive these days to the slightest sniff.”
Prescient as this all is, Lockdown is still essentially a crime novel. The bones of a young child have been discovered on the building site of a new hospital, and DI Jack Macneil faces a race against time to find out who killed the child and why.
Macneil is as sozzled as most literary policemen are. He wakes with a five o’clock shadow on his chin, and last night’s whisky on his breath. His wife has left him. He’s actually quit the force, but in the final 24 hours before he hands in his badge, this one last case presents itself.
Lockdown moves along at a fierce clip, fear and loathing lurking around every corner, the highly contagious virus – which may or may not have been manufactured by Dark Forces – ramping up the levels of general disquiet.
In the coming years, we will be deluged with all sorts of literary accounts of what it’s like to live through a pandemic. May’s effort will not, perhaps, prove as longremembered as others to come, but the swiftness of publication ensures that Lockdown feels inescapably relevant, its pages laden with existential dread. ■