Book review: Quarantine, by Nick Holdstock

After the pandemic, the pandemic novel. While Nick Holdstock has said he wrote a draft of this novel (his third) before any of us had heard of covid-19, it’s inevitable that readers will approach it looking for reflections of our own experience. And they are there, but only in part. In general (and, yes, it’s possible) the book is much bleaker.

The events of the story take place ten years after the outbreak of a virus known only as “Werner’s”, which claimed a billion lives worldwide. There is a vaccine but no cure, and death can take a while. The remaining few hundred infected people are living out their life sentences in secret prison camps. The world has forgotten them.

Lukas, a Polish former academic in his late thirties, is in one such camp in Central Asia, a grim international enclave of the sick and dying. With their basic needs supplied but little by way of diversions, he and his fellow inmates spend their days getting drunk, taking drugs and having ubiquitous but emotionless sex. There are conspiracy theorists and weird cults, suicide is commonplace, sanity teeters on the edge. Ennui is endemic, concealing something much more raw: despair.

Lukas’ story interweaves with that of Rebecca, an epidemiologist in New York, working for the institute which developed the vaccine. She lost her partner in the outbreak and, while the city celebrates five years since the last new infection, she is convinced the game isn’t over, testing the vaccine against laboratory-built mutations. While Lukas revels in permissiveness, she is trapped by fear, eating only “safe” food, having sex through a sanitised plastic sheet.

The plot develops slowly, with Holdstock taking plenty of time to let these two worlds take shape in the reader’s imagination. In the camp, this means introducing a bamboozling number of characters whom we only ever know in broad brush strokes. Despite their international names, they all speak good English, in a similar way.

As Rebecca’s world begins a tentative opening up, Lukas’ spirals into catastrophe. Accused of rape, he faces judgment in a kangaroo court organised by the other inmates. By the time Rebecca and Lukas meet, we are already three-quarters of the way through the book.

Holdstock writes dispassionately, and has an eye for visceral detail. He holds back, rightly, on the scientific details around the disease, allowing us to focus on the characters. But it’s a story with little light or redemption.

In essence, his subject is the aftermath of a global disaster and its effects on individuals. No one in the book is undamaged – by loss, anxiety, denial, or just plain despair. Many are damaged irreparably. People keep their emotions at arm’s length. Few, if any, seem capable of attachment, or compassion. I finished the book wanting to thank my lucky stars that “our” pandemic, bad though it was, was not as bad as this one.

Quarantine, by Nick Holdstock, Swift Press, £14.99