Janette Turner Hospital: Due Preparations For The Plague

Reviewed by ELSPETH SANDYS

This is Janette Turner Hospital's seventh novel. Finding adjectives to describe this latest tour de force is not difficult: it's complex, riveting, timely, and quite brilliant.

If Due Preparations was written, as I assume it must have been, before 9/11, then it is all the more remarkable for its uncanny prescience. At the centre of a richly varied cast of characters are the children who survive the hijacking of an Air France plane in 1987. They are the only survivors; and one by one, as they start to interrogate the past, and are watched and followed, they too become victims.

It would by impossible in a brief review to deconstruct even the bare bones of the plot of this novel. Turner Hospital's skill in creating the skewed universe of intelligence is so impressive I can't help wondering if she herself, in the course of her research, came under surveillance.

But in the end what sets this novel apart from its more pedestrian counterparts in the terror/intelligence genre is its insight into the mystery of dying, and the extraordinary connections that are made when a group of people - in this case the hostages in the Air France hijack - face certain death.

"It is after death that riddles show and torments begin," Lowell Hawthorne comments when his father, whose true identity will not be revealed till near the end, dies in a mysterious car crash. It is this event, at the beginning of the story, which sets in motion a chain of events destined to lead Lowell and his co-survivor, Samantha, into a labyrinth from which it seems there can be no escape.

Threaded through the novel is the idea of safety and its destruction as a given for the once-complacent citizens of the United States. Parallels are drawn from the past: the fall of Carthage, the siege of Troy, Dante's Inferno, Daniel in the lion's den. Evil, Turner Hospital is saying, has always been with us. And as in the past, so it is now: evil is not confined to one side of the conflict. George W. Bush's rhetoric is as skewed as the intelligence service over which he ostensibly has command. There is as much evil in the means the US uses to achieve its ends as there is in the pathological schemes of Sirocco, the mastermind behind the 1987 hijack.

The novel ends with a question: in the morally ambiguous universe we all now inhabit, "how do we ready ourselves for what might happen tomorrow?" It's a variation on the question, quoted at the front of the book, that Daniel Defoe asked in 1727 when plague broke out in London: "What preparations are proper to be made for death?"

The brilliance of Turner Hospital's novels rests finally in the humanity she brings to answering this question. Dignity is restored to all who have died at the hands of fanatics, whether they be Muslim fundamentalists, CIA operatives who have lost their souls, or the psychopaths whom both sides employ to do their dirty work. Horror builds upon horror, but Turner Hospital never forgets that the people caught up in these unimaginable events are like you and me.

Fourth Estate, $34.99