ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It’s a tall order, being the book that comes after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972).  But Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever is up to it.  What a book!

From the blurb description, I was not expecting to laugh out loud…

Alice had not expected to spend the first twenty years of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: was the world’s technology about to crash down around her? The world’s technology did not crash. But there were worse disasters to come: Environmental collapse. The return of fascism. Wars. A sexual reckoning. A plague.

Uncertain of what to do she picks up an unfinished project and finds herself trapped with the ghosts of writers past. What began as a novel about a member of the Bloomsbury set, colonial administrator, publisher and husband of one the most famous English writers of the twentieth century becomes something else altogether.

Complex, heartfelt, darkly funny and deeply moving, this is Sophie Cunningham’s most important book to date – a dazzlingly original novel about what it’s like to live through a time that feels like the end of days, and how we can find comfort and answers in the past.

Alice, to the eternal frustration of her agent, is supposed to be writing a novel about Leonard Woolf.  It’s not going well, and anyway — like most writers — Alice has to earn a living.  She does that in bookish ways, but it still interferes with her writing.

During Lockdown, she replaced jogging with Qigong classes, started a travel account on Instagram to host images from places around the world, and spent her days watching old episodes of Dr Who on iView.  In her Lockdown work life, she used the pandemic to provide topics for her How to Write a Novel™ class:

She worked with her legs under the doona to keep them warm, but make-up on her face so she could Zoom.  Her clothing was similarly schizophrenic.  Most days she wore pyjama pants with a cheerful shirt to convey a sense o professional positivity. (p. 182)

Here is Alice, distractible at the best of times, attending a board meeting by Zoom.  They are discussing April sales figures, and her mind is wandering, triggered by images of the Brisbane members of the board on their verandahs.  She remembers a trip to visit her siblings in Bermagui, and wonders when, if ever, she will be able to see them again.

She’d tried, once, twice, three times, but first the Alpine Way was on fire, then the Princes Highway.  For two months after that, various sections of the road were closed. At the end of March the roads were opened but stage three lockdown restrictions came into play.  She planned to go in mid-July, but by then the border had been closed.  Would it be years before she could be with her siblings again? Years before she saw the forest of spotted gums that lined the road that swept into Bermagui, before she saw the sleepy town’s pelicans, saw the pale-blue armies of soldier crabs pouring out onto the mudflats, before she had a chance to walk the road that had been turned into a nature reserve and left to fall into the sea?

Alice understood that summer fires followed by late summer floods were considered to be part of the cascading effect of climate change.  She understood that deforestation let to an increased likelihood of pandemics as surely as WW1 had harboured the influenza pandemic a hundred years before. She understood that COVID-19 was now through the aged care system and that Hen would most likely die and she was unlikely to ever see her in person again, but frankly, understanding didn’t seem to make a difference, for she was overwhelmed, couldn’t look every which way at once and anyway it semmed that the genie was out of the bottle, the tipping point had tipped, and now here she was, here everyone was, living in the territory of the unprecedented, the territory of pivoting, the territory of grief and loss.

And her Sophie Cunningham shows herself to be a master of timing…

Her fugue state came to an end when her elaborate arrangement of pillows collapsed and the entire catastrophe that was her work life was revealed to the board meeting.  When asked for her view on a particular issue, Alice found herself making pronouncements on her back, holding her laptop over her face with outstretched arms.

Her concerned friend sends a DM, and here we see the unvarnished truth of communication that is not F2F…

People not in lockdown, not in Melbourne, HAVE NO IDEA. That is what Alice wanted to type into the chat, but did not.  Instead she typed: SORRY.

The people of Melbourne were becoming impossibly martyrish, entitled and smug.  That is what Alice’s friend who, as a Boon Wurrung woman, had lost patience with white people’s whiny bullshit some years ago, wanted to say.  Instead she typed: Call if you need.  I’m here for you. (p.183-4)

This is sheer genius.  Remember this next time you receive a ‘nothing’ sort of text message, and make time for proper F2F contact.

In this video at about 31:00 onward, Sophie Cunningham talks about how novels should, without being un-serious, be more fun to read and more fun to do.  This Devastating Fever is an exemplar of that. But more of that when I write my review.

Author: Sophie Cunningham
Title: This Devastating Fever
Publisher: Ultimo Press, 2022
Cover design by Akiko Chan
ISBN: 9781761150937, pbk., 313 pages
Source: Personal copy purchased from Benn’s Books $32.99