At first I accepted lockdown, then came the plot twists
No work and nowhere to go, I was overcome with a very unfamiliar feeling
The coronavirus that’s disrupted our lives these last several months has much in common, unfortunately, with the best thrillers and crime novels.
A superb thriller keeps you guessing. Things happen that you never saw coming. You haven’t a clue how it’s going to turn out. COVID-19, in a nutshell. It was no worse than the flu, then it was much worse than the flu. It only affected the elderly, then people of all ages were coming down with it. It came from China, or maybe it came from Europe. A vaccine is two years away, a vaccine is imminent. You can finally go to a bar — no wait, you can’t. We don’t know where it’s going or when it’s going to end, and we’re all getting more than a little tired of it.
But I can’t lie. At the beginning of this epic, I kind of embraced the self-isolation. I was liberated from commitments. Everything in my datebook through to the end of the year was scratched out.
OK, “embraced” is the wrong word, considering the despair and suffering COVID-19 has inflicted. Not just for those who’ve contracted it, and their families, but for the thousands of support workers, ranging from healthcare professionals to those stocking grocery store shelves.
But if we had to self-isolate, to emerge from home only to buy necessities or take a walk around what seemed, on some days, a post-apocalyptic neighbourhood, I’d find a way to accept it.
I do a lot of book-related travel. (My wife, Neetha, and I had been to a literary festival in Dubai in early February, just as concerns about the virus were coming to the fore.) It’s fun going to interesting places and meeting readers, but travel takes its toll, so to have every engagement through to 2021 scratched out of my datebook made me feel, well, more relaxed than anxious. On top of that, I’d delivered next year’s book to my publishers, plus a revised screenplay to a producer, at the beginning of March.
As we all went into lockdown, I had nothing on my plate. No work, no deadlines, and nowhere to go. I was overcome with a very unfamiliar feeling. I was not stressed out.
So Neetha and I bingewatched shows, devoured stacks of books. She made banana bread and minestrone. I’m a model train nut, so for about six weeks I worked on the 25-square-metre layout in the basement, making hills and roads, planting fake trees, constructing bridges. The time I spent creating a world with my hands, instead of making one up in my head, was a unique therapy. But then came the plot twists. The situation was getting worse, not better. We were unable to detach ourselves from the news. When you’ve spent three decades in the newspaper business, it’s very hard to ignore current events.
Like everyone else, we missed people. We missed conversation. More than anything, we missed seeing our kids, Spencer and Paige. They’d volunteered to do many grocery runs for us, and those ten minutes of distanced conversation during a front door delivery became the highlight of the week. But what we really wanted, and still do, was to hug them. To hold them in our arms, if only for a moment.
It became increasingly difficult to focus. Just as well I’d already delivered a new book. But I was already thinking ahead to the next one (I’m on book-a-year kind of schedule) and wondering how it might be different than all those that have come before. Readers, reaching out through Facebook and Twitter, assumed the current situation was providing inspiration. There has to be a pandemic novel in the works, right?
Wrong. First of all, how many other writers are being so inspired? No sense doing what everyone else might be doing, and besides, the great pandemic novel, “The Stand,” was written by Stephen King more than four decades ago. And I’d already written a mini-pandemic thriller, “The Twenty-Three,” about a town’s water supply being poisoned. And yet. Even if I don’t write a virusinspired thriller (and while I’m at it, may I recommend “Cold Storage,” by David Koepp?), how does COVID-19 infect anything I’ll produce in the future? My book that comes out next year, tentatively titled “Find You First,” makes no mention of it. No character wears a mask. No one is social-distancing. People hang out in bars and restaurants. It was written over the winter, before any of this had happened.
But what about the novel I’ll start writing this fall, set for a 2022 release? Will my characters, as they go about their business, wear masks and practise social distancing? This is where the not-knowing-where-it’s going comes into play. If (fingers crossed) a vaccine is discovered by the time that book is released, will such references date it? Is it better to pretend, from a fictional point of view, that this nightmare never happened?
I’m hardly alone in pondering these questions. Every writer of scripted TV shows, of movies, has to be wondering the same thing. Granted, in the overall scheme of things, our dilemma is small change to what people on the front line are dealing with.
And even if you like a good thriller, sometimes you want to mix it up. Read a biography, a romance, a literary classic. Will readers even want novels set amidst the coronavirus? Sure, non-fiction accounts of Donald Trump’s catastrophic bungling of the crisis will be fascinating reading, but fiction’s another matter. In the future, with the passage of time, there will be some good novels that examine this period, but we’re not there yet. (Says the guy who actually watched the movie “Contagion” recently.)
And besides, like I said at the outset, we don’t know how this one turns out. We still can’t see where it’s going.
This is one ending I wouldn’t mind having spoiled.
Linwood Barclay’s latest book is “Elevator Pitch.”