Music

Just as the Great War was winding down in the autumn of 1918, the Spanish flu epidemic struck. With a worldwide death toll of 100 million, it is considered to be the mother of all pandemics. The rising morbidity rates caused shock and confusion. In London, where this novel is set, shops stood abandoned, people donned gauze masks, schools closed, pedestrians collapsed on the pavement and hospitals turned away the ill.

This restrained and unnerving novel gains strength like the virus it describes. A young doctor dies on the street while trying to post a letter warning the health authorities that a plague is imminent. The neighbourhood undertaker, Henry Speake, intercepts the letter and puzzles over it. He senses that there is something different about this particular influenza, noting the blue tint of the corpses he tends and the pattern of its victims (those most affected were between age 20 and 40). Henry begins meeting with a school teacher, the middle-class Mrs Thompson, to confer on the progress of the outbreak. Despite the incipient frenzy, social boundaries must be observed and ‘consorting with a tradesman’ is frowned upon. As the crisis peaks, class expectation begins to crumble and an unlikely love story develops.

We follow Henry through the grim households filled with wrenching multiple deaths – whole families ailing and children piled into bed with no one left standing to nurse. Up and down the dark stairways he goes to measure for coffins, noting the sickroom smells, cold kitchen stoves and full chamber pots. Henry moves through the ‘mountains of dead’, all the while wondering at the failing order; surely the government has a plan in place? In the end he becomes a man of action and good deed by forwarding the young doctor’s letter to the health ministry, with unexpected results.

James registers the tiny details of suffering, from the doomed shock of one character feeling the first signs of illness to the sweet biscuit being pressed into the hand of a dead baby just before the coffin is closed. The book ends a bit abruptly, almost like a breaking fever, showing that such a scourge can randomly take anything in its path, leaving behind misery, but also human dignity.