A peculiar thing happened to me at the start of lockdown. I’ve always read novels, sometimes classics, but more often contemporary fiction. I try to read the Booker shortlist, the novelists whose work is reviewed in The Guardian and on R4’s Front Row and Saturday Review, the novels recommended in Waterstone’s and by my local independent bookshops, Hart’s Books in Saffron Walden and the Book Nook in Ware. I try to buy new hardbacks where I can, to support those bookshops, and so I can kid myself I’m keeping up.
All of a sudden, in the last week of March, with the pandemic raging across Europe, I couldn’t focus on any work of fiction set in the present day, by which I mean B.C., though I found I was okay if the story dealt with countries torn apart by war or some other cataclysm. I guess we’ve been relatively insulated from mass peril for a long time in the UK, because in the end, for me as a reader, it came down to whether the novel was set in a time and place without antibiotics. So I read and re-read Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, gripped by the proximity of death throughout, and feeling a jolt of recognition when I reached p. 409, and Cromwell’s opinions of the dangers of pilgrimage: ‘nothing comes of trailing from shire to shire to pray. You can pray at home. It costs you less, you don’t get robbed on the road, and you don’t spread diseases or carry them back to your native country.’ I shiver in sympathy whenever Cromwell thinks about his wife and daughters, victims of the sleeping-sickness, a disease which could kill in hours.
I have to be grateful my own fiction is set in the early eighteenth century or I doubt I could concentrate on that, either. The barber-surgeon in the sequel to A Pair of Sharp Eyes is prone to prescribe Jesuit’s Bark (for most complaints) or administer a clyster (enema) when anyone succumbs to Yellow Fever. Good luck with that. When I started work on the book I was conscious of the risks faced by travellers in the age of sail. Now I feel a horrified kinship with my characters, and can understand much more why pre-twentieth-century fiction is so concerned with health and dying. I think I’d find it difficult to sustain a sense of engagement if my story was set in 2000, or 2019, or even January 2020. Those times are tinged with nostalgia, inevitably. What was the joke about the Victorian novel? Cough in Chapter One, dead by Chapter Three? It doesn’t seem so funny now, when most of us are like Mantel’s Henry VIII, terrified of catching the plague whenever someone sneezes.