Book: Pandemic

You wouldn’t think I’d want to read a book about a pandemic, but maybe I’m a masochist because I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Kalla’s 2005 novel aptly titled, Pandemic. Written 15 years before the word “COVID” was a thought in the wider public’s consciousness, Kalla’s book is eerily prescient and timely, albeit the terrorist angle oddly feels quaint now, if still terrifying to consider.

The book follows Dr. Noah Haldane, an emerging pathogens expert working for the World Health Organization, who goes from country to country, continent to continent, investigating the emergence of the world’s deadliest diseases to contain the spread. (I have to say, how neat is it that that’s a job, even if it’s terrifying work, all things considered?) He’s particularly worried, though, about the world being overdue for the another worldwide epidemic like the 1918 Spanish flu, which wiped out millions of people and that was before the ubiquity of air travel. However, what makes the situation even more sinister in Kalla’s capable hands is to consider what would happen if a few Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt, a sort of offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, were to weaponize the flu in an effort to spread it from China to the Western world to “negotiate” America out of Islamic countries. That’s exactly what happens in this book, though. The Islamists infect themselves and then fly to London and Hong Kong and ride elevators in the hotels to spread the disease. Interestingly, the highly violent general of the group isn’t really motivated by being a true believer; rather, he’s motivated by revenge against the Egyptian military elite who passed him up for a promotion. That’s right. He risked and sought millions of deaths and other calamities as a result over a job dispute. But I loved that wrinkle! As dastardly and psychotic as it may be. I also enjoyed that Kalla added an Egyptian detective character, who is not only motivated in opposition to the Islamists for ruining the name and message of Islam, but he actually helps crack the case against them and help the Americans. I was sad when he died, although luckily he died on his own terms and wasn’t tortured to death by the general.

Like, let’s be real: as we saw with COVID, a virus is bad enough! It’s destabilizing and deadly enough. It forces draconian lockdowns in China (remarked upon in the book) and brings American society to a halt, emptying its streets (also remarked upon in the book). And the disease in Kalla’s book is more deadly both in what it does to the body and in the fact that it kills not just healthy, young people, but one in four people who contract it. In other words, most influenza viruses, including COVID, kill far less than 1 percent of the people infected; this one in the book was killing 25 percent of all people infected. If it was more contagious …

Again, what I love about this book is how grounded in reality it is and I know this to be the case because I read it after we experienced our own killer, world-shifting pandemic! Even down to the bureaucrats worrying about telling the public the truth about the virus for fear of causing mass panic, or the ways in which the smallest of human errors can cause calamities, or the ways in which hubris can likewise cause calamities. Ignorance and arrogance (the Chinese, for example, thinking they had contained it) alike are twin fortunes for the proliferation of a virus. That said, the bureaucrats and the WHO largely did well in response to the pandemic, arguably better than our own bureaucrats did.

Naturally, we get some domestic squabbles intermixed throughout the book to add some character heft, primarily through Noah’s disintegrating marriage with his wife (she cheated on him) and him missing his 4-year-old daughter because of his WHO work travel. But also, Noah falls for the U.S. “Bug Czar,” Gwen. It was cute, if expected. The story gets a little dramatic beyond its realistic roots when the bad Egyptian general survives a raid in Somalia by American special forces and brings a more contagious mutation of the virus to the U.S. and somehow, also finds Gwen and kidnaps her. Then, Noah, another WHO member, and a CIA guy, take down the terrorists themselves to rescue her. Don’t get me wrong, I was breathlessly flipping the pages to see what would happen! But it wasn’t as grounded as the rest of the book.

Still, I thought Kalla’s book was really well-done, and it moved at a fast clip because of the way a pandemic unfurls, where it feels far away and remote, trickling into our awareness at first, and then once it’s jumping from person-to-person, country-to-country, and continent-to-continent (and likewise, Noah and the WHO are jumping with it), it feels overwhelming and rapid all at once. The decision-making Noah, Gwen, and the U.S. government went through both in how to track the source of the virus and then how to deal with the terrorist aspect of it, was enthralling, too. And again, realistic! Heck, even the rapid development of a efficacious vaccine occurs as a subplot in this book.

The potential threat of bioterrorism isn’t someone weaponizing some of the boogeymen of diseases because those are too difficult, but in Kalla’s imagining, weaponizing something that is far easier to turn into a lethal weapon and make it contagious: the flu, and we saw as much in the book. Four strategically positioned, infected terrorists killed hundreds across the globe. If more had been able to infect others on a “viral” suicide mission, then who knows what could have happened. It’ll spook you out to consider the ramifications, especially, again, now that we’ve experienced COVID. So, if you’re also a masochist like me, and you want to read an eerily prescient book about how a pandemic might unfurl with some dramatic flourishes, then I recommend Kalla’s well-researched and logical book.