Bleak Midwinter

Peter Millar

Bloomsbury, 2002, £6.99, pp 372

ISBN 0 747 55751 9

Rating: ***

Recently many of us watched the fictional BBC account of a smallpox pandemic in which 60 million people died; the virus was unleashed deliberately by a terrorist, causing civil unrest and economic collapse as it spread across the globe.

The uncontrolled epidemic was caused by doctors not recognising the disease and officials not acting fast enough. Imagine a repeat of the black death of the middle ages: Bleak Midwinter is exactly that.

Two weeks before Christmas, Rajiv Mahendra, a trainee doctor at Oxfords John Radcliffe Hospital, encounters a patient with rare symptoms. The swellings around the mans groin and armpit are like “evil, purplish black eggs,” and his cough is “sharp and hacking” and splatters the bed sheets bright red with blood. To the young Indian doctor, these symptoms are sinisterly familiar. In India, the disease is known as the bubonic plague. The last time it occurred on a large scale in Europe—carried by fleas living on the rats which came ashore from being carried on ships from the Far East—it was known as the black death, and a third of the population died.

Bleak Midwinter is a thoughtful but fast moving and informative thriller. Millar examines the effect of the epidemic reappearing and the difficulties associated with formulating an appropriate response to a disease which is thought of as irrelevant and essentially confined to the history books.

The main characters are the trainee doctor, whose experience with the disease is always in conflict with a pompous, suspicious looking, and difficult consultant; a PhD student who has been delving into the details of medieval medicine; and an ambitious but naive journalist who becomes closely involved with events as she attempts to spill the beans on a healthcare system in crisis.

This book cleverly intertwines history with the present. We are given Father Grays 14th century, bleakly fastidious account of the decimation of his parish and his terror when he discovered that his own daughter was covered with the boils. He witnessed the “foul pestilence spread its canker even to her most private parts.” This intertwining unsettles the reader and enables you to experience the disease as it hits Oxford; it is a scary possibility that this disease might be lurking in the hands of those with the capability for biological warfare.