Breathing again
... provisionally, anyway. But aren't we all.
Yeah yeah, I'm feeling a bit morbid this morning. Natural enough side-effect, I expect, of reading through the rest of John M. Barry's history of the 1918 pandemic while in the throes of a thoroughly unpleasant (if vastly less unpleasant and deadly) viral invasion yourself. Don't you just hate it when it actually hurts to breathe? I mean, I really like breathing.
Anyway. It seems to have stopped hurting. Life goes on.
As to the Barry book: it was comprehensive, well-paced, but the prose style got a bit grating by the end. He had this recurring motif: 'This was influenza, only influenza'... which could be pretty dramatic applied to some of the more grisly and dramatic things that virus happened to do. But it did get on my nerves, after a while.
In fairness, I think the basic trouble is the horror of this thing is pretty hard to grapple with for anyone. Barry tried hard to do so, tried to work some of the more effective old staples of horror writing to make it fly—the leaden, understated sentence summing up each new misery, dropped onto the end of a more descriptive paragraph with the air of a coup de grâce, the leading 'It would get worse, still...' or equivalent at the end of each chapter leading to the next bit of nastiness—and, naturally, it comes off as a bit melodramatic—but then, the pandemic was one dramatic bit of business. Not sure what else he was supposed to do.
As to my own reactions, as a guy who's spent a bit of time in rural areas, I found the descriptions of what it did to Inuit and Amerindian populations in Alaska and Labrador particularly chilling... the image of being in a tiny, isolated settlement, having that thing tear through, killing just about everybody, leaving no-one strong enough actually to keep wood on the fire, after which the dogs tear up the corpses, that's got a level of terror for me somehow more unsettling even than the scenes from urban areas—piled corpses and mass graves recalling the worst of the plague years.
Anyway: full marks for the scholarship, which was comprehensive. Full marks for the narrative arch, which was positively self-indulgent (and I'm all for that) at following numerous side-currents in the lives of the researchers trying to work out what the disease agent was. And suspended judgement for the prose style. Like I said, I don't know what else you're supposed to do with this subject. Criticizing it as a bit heavy on the pipe organ music almost seems petty. Like complaining to the captain of the Titanic as he tearfully addresses his crew for the last time that he's overacting, or something.
Yeah yeah, I'm feeling a bit morbid this morning. Natural enough side-effect, I expect, of reading through the rest of John M. Barry's history of the 1918 pandemic while in the throes of a thoroughly unpleasant (if vastly less unpleasant and deadly) viral invasion yourself. Don't you just hate it when it actually hurts to breathe? I mean, I really like breathing.
Anyway. It seems to have stopped hurting. Life goes on.
As to the Barry book: it was comprehensive, well-paced, but the prose style got a bit grating by the end. He had this recurring motif: 'This was influenza, only influenza'... which could be pretty dramatic applied to some of the more grisly and dramatic things that virus happened to do. But it did get on my nerves, after a while.
In fairness, I think the basic trouble is the horror of this thing is pretty hard to grapple with for anyone. Barry tried hard to do so, tried to work some of the more effective old staples of horror writing to make it fly—the leaden, understated sentence summing up each new misery, dropped onto the end of a more descriptive paragraph with the air of a coup de grâce, the leading 'It would get worse, still...' or equivalent at the end of each chapter leading to the next bit of nastiness—and, naturally, it comes off as a bit melodramatic—but then, the pandemic was one dramatic bit of business. Not sure what else he was supposed to do.
As to my own reactions, as a guy who's spent a bit of time in rural areas, I found the descriptions of what it did to Inuit and Amerindian populations in Alaska and Labrador particularly chilling... the image of being in a tiny, isolated settlement, having that thing tear through, killing just about everybody, leaving no-one strong enough actually to keep wood on the fire, after which the dogs tear up the corpses, that's got a level of terror for me somehow more unsettling even than the scenes from urban areas—piled corpses and mass graves recalling the worst of the plague years.
Anyway: full marks for the scholarship, which was comprehensive. Full marks for the narrative arch, which was positively self-indulgent (and I'm all for that) at following numerous side-currents in the lives of the researchers trying to work out what the disease agent was. And suspended judgement for the prose style. Like I said, I don't know what else you're supposed to do with this subject. Criticizing it as a bit heavy on the pipe organ music almost seems petty. Like complaining to the captain of the Titanic as he tearfully addresses his crew for the last time that he's overacting, or something.
posted by AJM at 3:46 a.m. (Permanent Link)
