Review of PHASE SIX by Jim Shepard

 4 Stars

This book could destroy any comfort you are feeling in the (hopefully) waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sometime in the near future, eleven-year-old Aleq and his best friend Malik live in Ilimanaq, a tiny community in Greenland.  One day they explore a rare metals mining site where they play on a “giant pile of excavated permafrost” and are exposed to “a cluster of molecules that had previously thrived in the respiratory tract of an early variant of the Bering goose and that had been trapped . . . during the Holocene glaciation [and now] had been reintroduced to the air and the warming sun.”  Shortly after their return home, everyone starts becoming ill.  Though the number of dead climbs, Aleq survives.    The Center for Disease Control sends Jeannine Dziri and Danice Torrone to Greenland to investigate the illness.  They need information from Aleq, but he is severely traumatized.  The disease has a mortality rate of about 40 percent and spreads so rapidly that “By day thirty-five, estimations were as high as fourteen million infected.”

The novel focuses on four characters:  Aleq, Jeannine, Danice, and Val.   Aleq, as a survivor of the initial infection site, is kept in quarantine and studied to determine why he has survived.  Danice and Jeannine and researchers around the world work to determine what causes the illness, how it spreads, how to treat the sick, and how to stop the spread.  Val is an ICU physician who treats patients on the front lines; her hospital is quickly overwhelmed by the number of cases.

The book was penned before COVID-19, though references to it were added during editing.  The reactions in the book certainly are exactly what we have experienced in the last 1 ½ years:  panic, uncertainty, resistance to public health restrictions, and an overload of media coverage and speculation.  Mention is made to a flood of online misinformation:  “reality was being abandoned the way you might walk away from farmland that had lost its water source.”  Anyone who followed the WHO press conferences will nod at this description:  “The WHO, which had followed its global alert with a series of travel warnings and then a series of travel bans, and then a series of situation bulletins, on day thirty-six finally ceased its foot-dragging and upped its announced pandemic level to Phase 6, its highest, designating for anyone who might have missed it by this point that a global pandemic was officially under way.”  Hearing about low vaccination rates in Republican states, I agreed with a suggestion that there be “an immediate halt to all flights out of states with Republican governors to reduce the spread of political imbecility.”

Interspersed throughout the narrative are short informational passages giving the reader some sobering facts:  “Well before COVID-19, a survey in Global Public Health in 2006 had caused a stir in the international medical community by revealing that 90 percent of the epidemiologists polled predicted a major pandemic – one that would kill more than 150 million people – in one of the next two generations.”  Did you know that “On average, the world encounters one new communicable disease each year, as pathogens evolve by leaps and bounds in ways that enhance their durability, transmissibility, and virulence”?  If you’re a betting person, “’Who would you put your money on?  Humans have been around for what, two hundred thousand years?  And bacteria for like three and a half billion.’”  Anyone wanting to dismiss Shepard’s opinion might want to look at the extensive bibliography provided. 

Shepard understands human nature because he suggests that we tend to revert to our old ways once a crisis has passed:  “The COVID-19 pandemic had exposed the way America’s health care system, having been stripped to the bare bones to maximize profit, was uniquely ill-equipped to handle the dramatically added burdens of disaster.  But as in so many instances in American politics, after the lesson had been learned nothing had been done about it.”  Later, there is reference to there being “no adequately funded or internationally coordinated system of focus, cooperation, and response.  Public policy’s position in the U.S. and a surprising number of other countries had been to rebuild the status quo and then to sit back and wait for the next avalanche, as though pandemics were not a recurring natural phenomenon.”

In the book, the bonds of love and friendship that are formed in the midst of the catastrophe are heart-warming, but if such bonds are all that we have to bring us through a crisis, we are in deep trouble.  The fate of some characters and the ending may leave readers angry and frustrated, but given the book’s subject matter and message, it is the only acceptable conclusion. 

I recommend this cautionary tale, but I warn you that it is not escapist literature.