Pale Rider
A deeply frustrating book, for the sole reason of it’s publication date.
Laura Spinney first published Pale Rider in 2017, just before the centinery of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic.
The book cited the flu as an unrecognised contributor to global history, overshadowed by the world wars but with potential to be just as significant. One not memorialised in art, poetry or literature in a curious conspiracy of silence.
A flu that infected as many as 500 million people, perhaps a third of global population. A flu that killed perhaps 1 in five of those who contracted it, with estimates ranging to 100 million. The deadliest pandemic in human history.
The book weaves history, sociology, politics, medical and scientific knowledge together artfully and accessibly. At all times she manages to make this seem such a human story, despite the enormous numbers. We see individual reactions across the globe in vivid detail.
My frustrations are purely born of what would happen a mere three years after the book is published and the COVID pandemic arrived.
So many of the issue discussed in the book were daily talking points for two year of our lives after. So many things that felt like us living in a unique global moment turn out to be repetition of mistakes of our great grandparents.
We see policymakers across the world debate school closures, the shadow of post viral fatigue syndromes, effective quarantines in places like Australia, then a rush to reopen inviting the disease in. We see misinformation, scientific disillusionment, vaccine skepticism borne out of both ignorance and legitimate fears of what the powerful have previously claimed were gifts.
It’s difficult to not get the sense we should have known better. Both collectively that so many of these same patterns would play out 100 years later suggest we’ve learned little. Even more frustratingly that this book would have been in most bookshops I and everyone else walked past for the years the COVID pandemic went on.
Many of the characters we meet along the way would have been astounded at the tools we have to hand. As they struggled to convince of basic germ theory we can sequence viral DNA in hours, test and ship RNA vaccines in a short year.
But that alone won’t save us from the next one. Pandemic remains one of the most likely and impactful things that could sweep across precarious and comfortable lives alike. Perhaps we should all be students of pandemics past in preparation.
After "Pale Rider" I read: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Before "Pale Rider" I read: Empire of AI