Books in Brief: The Scourge

The Scourge, by Thomas L. Dunne (Coward, McCann, 312 pp., $9.95).

On the face of it, the story line seems about as much fun as the Khmer Rouge. In the opening scene, set in the 1980s, an Italo-American housewife dies of cancer, and the reader is made to feel both her suffering and her husband’s anguish. Similarly morbid closeups follow. Flash to the big picture: a statistical wizard at the NIH notices a small but significant increase in the incidence of cancer, projects his figures, and foresees an epidemic that may kill a hundred million Americans within a year. The epidemic materializes and becomes worldwide, devastating the entire planet except for scattered areas of extreme poverty and, mysteriously, the Soviet Union and parts of China. Scientists struggle valiantly but vainly to find cause or cure; surgeons, operating under MASH-like conditions, are forced to resort to a system of triage in which victims over sixty are given analgesics and simply allowed to die. And the scourge goes on, wreaking its ghastly toll. The danger with such a plot is its nightmarish quality; it wants to degenerate into an unresolved and unresolvable chaos. That danger is compounded when the author has, as Tom Dunne does, a macabre comic imagination. A government crash program to alleviate the suffering by passing out suicide tablets is dubbed Operation Nightcap. In the general panic, cults proliferate: one such is convinced that masturbation has brought on the epidemic and organizes to eliminate that sin; another is convinced that masturbation is the only preventive and tries to organize a mass-turbation. A riot that destroys Atlanta is rendered as a marvelous parody of the scene in Gone with the Wind. The central character, a scientist named Zimmerman, is a first class schmuck who gets cancer of the schmuck, his affliction being discovered when a spy administers fellatio to him. President Thomas Wilson, a caricature of Woodrow Wilson, first tries to keep the epidemic a secret and then, convinced that the whole thing is a Soviet plot, proposes to rise to presidential greatness by pushing the biological warfare button. The cause of the epidemic, when found, leads to the most bizarre climax since Dr. No was buried under a mountain of guano. But the danger of overwriting is avoided. For Dunne’s imagination is tempered by a quality that is too often missing—discipline. He keeps his story under tight rein. The excitement of the search, the political twists, the zany episodes are skillfully blended; the medical and scientific details are handled convincingly; interspersed through the narrative are gruesome but finely drawn vignettes of individual victims, to remind us of the terrible reality of disease. Thus a plot that could have got out of hand never does: it moves swiftly, suspensefully, chillingly onward. The book is so compelling that John Greenway will not be able to put it down, and everybody knows John Greenway can put down anything. Don’t wait for the movie. The story has all the ingredients of a super flick, but Hollywood will probably botch it. The TV series, now—that’s something else again. I can see it clearly: the format is an ongoing search, as in The Fugitive, with maybe Chad Everett as the dedicated scientist, trying week after week to track down the evil virus, played by Telly Savalas or perhaps Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

FM

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Forrest McDonald

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The Scourge, by Thomas L. Dunne (Coward, McCann, 312 pp., $9.95).

On the face of it, the story line seems about as much fun as the Khmer Rouge. In the opening scene, set in the 1980s, an Italo-American housewife dies of cancer, and the reader is made to feel both her suffering and her husband’s anguish. Similarly morbid closeups follow. Flash to the big picture: a statistical wizard at the NIH notices a small but significant increase in the incidence of cancer, projects his figures, and foresees an epidemic that may kill a hundred million Americans within a year. The epidemic materializes and becomes worldwide, devastating the entire planet except for scattered areas of extreme poverty and, mysteriously, the Soviet Union and parts of China. Scientists struggle valiantly but vainly to find cause or cure; surgeons, operating under MASH-like conditions, are forced to resort to a system of triage in which victims over sixty are given analgesics and simply allowed to die. And the scourge goes on, wreaking its ghastly toll. The danger with such a plot is its nightmarish quality; it wants to degenerate into an unresolved and unresolvable chaos. That danger is compounded when the author has, as Tom Dunne does, a macabre comic imagination. A government crash program to alleviate the suffering by passing out suicide tablets is dubbed Operation Nightcap. In the general panic, cults proliferate: one such is convinced that masturbation has brought on the epidemic and organizes to eliminate that sin; another is convinced that masturbation is the only preventive and tries to organize a mass-turbation. A riot that destroys Atlanta is rendered as a marvelous parody of the scene in Gone with the Wind. The central character, a scientist named Zimmerman, is a first class schmuck who gets cancer of the schmuck, his affliction being discovered when a spy administers fellatio to him. President Thomas Wilson, a caricature of Woodrow Wilson, first tries to keep the epidemic a secret and then, convinced that the whole thing is a Soviet plot, proposes to rise to presidential greatness by pushing the biological warfare button. The cause of the epidemic, when found, leads to the most bizarre climax since Dr. No was buried under a mountain of guano. But the danger of overwriting is avoided. For Dunne’s imagination is tempered by a quality that is too often missing—discipline. He keeps his story under tight rein. The excitement of the search, the political twists, the zany episodes are skillfully blended; the medical and scientific details are handled convincingly; interspersed through the narrative are gruesome but finely drawn vignettes of individual victims, to remind us of the terrible reality of disease. Thus a plot that could have got out of hand never does: it moves swiftly, suspensefully, chillingly onward. The book is so compelling that John Greenway will not be able to put it down, and everybody knows John Greenway can put down anything. Don’t wait for the movie. The story has all the ingredients of a super flick, but Hollywood will probably botch it. The TV series, now—that’s something else again. I can see it clearly: the format is an ongoing search, as in The Fugitive, with maybe Chad Everett as the dedicated scientist, trying week after week to track down the evil virus, played by Telly Savalas or perhaps Farrah Fawcett-Majors.