ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

It wasn’t an idle comment, when I wrote on my Sensational Snippet post:

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!

It seems almost inevitable that a book which follows something as brilliant as Calvino’s masterpiece, will be a disappointment.  And yet This Devastating Fever held me captivated from beginning to end.  I could not have chosen a better book to follow Invisible Cities.  It is that good.

This Devastating Fever has two storylines which blur into each other.  There is an author called Alice in the 21st century, who shares some personal and professional history with Cunningham herself; and there is Leonard Woolf in the 20th century, about whom Alice has been trying to write a book for twenty years.

Interspersed with other things, of course, because she has to earn a living. But she is also distractible.  It is lockdown in Melbourne which makes her get on with it.

Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), is of course the husband of the eminent modernist author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).  Long ago I read her books but not his, and I have on the TBR a bio of Leonard (by Victoria Glendinning) but not of Virginia.  Well, we all know about her, don’t we? Or we think we do. Cunningham’s extensively researched novel shows us otherwise.

Virginia Woolf was among the innovative women writers who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a literary device in the early 20th century.  Wikipedia says that her first novel The Voyage Out* was published in the same year as Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915, Pilgrimage #1, see my unenthusiastic review) and that Woolf showed in this early novel, techniques used in later novels, including the gap between preceding thought and the spoken word that follows, and the lack of concordance between expression and underlying intention, together with how these reveal to us aspects of the nature of love.  

Did I know that Cunningham was, in such a sophisticated way, channelling Woolf with that same technique when I shared the excerpt that depicted self-censoring in my Sensational Snippet?  No, I did not.   This Devastating Fever is a book that will bear re-reading, for sure.  There is much to explore in a second reading: through the prism of Alice’s fraught efforts to finish her stalled novel during the pandemic, Cunningham interrogates the past and the present. Through Leonard’s time in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), she casts her perceptive eye over colonialism and its aftermath.  She expresses her characters’ fears about the world order during tumultuous geo-political times and what feels like the end of days in a looming catastrophe.

Cunningham explores the struggles of a writing life then and now; and — detailing the close bond between Leonard and Virginia alongside Alice’s relationship with Edith, she unpacks the hazards of intimate relationships under extreme pressure.  She contrasts the incestuous (but in the case of the Woolf marriage, asexual) relationships among the Bloomsbury set with enforced intimacy during lockdowns.

The days began to blur.  She and Edith cordoned off different sections of the house so they could work without having to look at each other, having to listen to each other.  Her territory was the bedroom, which she barely left. (p.181)

(Being in lockdown was, in a sourly ironic kind of way, like travel in non-English-speaking countries where the only real conversation you can have is with your travel partner.  After a few short weeks, no matter how fond you may be, you are desperate to talk with somebody else!)

Cunningham contrasts Leonard’s determination to keep Virginia out of institutional care with contemporary care of the vulnerable and unmanageable aged.

Alice managed to see Hen just the once before lockdown took hold.  Hen recognised her, despite the PPE, the moment she walked through the security doors of the ward.  A smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face, then it twisted.  Despite the lightness of her frame she lifted herself out of the wheelchair and ran at Alice.  The ties that bound her to the chair dug into her wrists.  She tried to shrug the wheelchair onto her back, a snail dragging her shell.  Her rage was pure.  Alice had never seen anything like it. She approached Hen, holding up her hands in a placatory gesture, but Hen managed to sideswipe Alice with the chair before collapsing onto the floor.  (p.176)

If you’ve never seen someone genuinely demented, it is a frightening experience.

Alice realises towards the end of the novel that her sense of doom about the world being at the end of days is not unique.  Cataclysmic events litter the 20th century’s trajectory, and each generation feared the worst.  Terrible things can happen to individuals, and terrible events can impact on thousands, millions.  WW1.  The ‘Spanish’ flu.  WW2. The tsunami in Sri Lanka. The death of millions of animals in the bushfires in the summer of 2019-20.  Covid.

Friends lost their jobs.  Comedians continued their shows without a live audience or a laugh track.  Cruise ships floated offshore around the world, their customers locked into their cabins, trying to find a port.  People died on the streets of London, New York, Delhi.  Burnt forests were logged. Newspapers closed.  Hundreds then thousands then millions of people died.  (p.176)

Yet, as I showed in the excerpts that I quoted in my Sensational Snippet, this is not a gloomy novel.  It is thoughtful and wise, and Alice’s self-deprecating humour is often laugh-out-loud funny.

In this video at about 39:00 onward, Cunningham talks about being on ‘Team Leonard’ despite problematic aspects of his behaviour, and how early drafts of this novel depicted Virginia as a victim.  The Virginia of this final version is not a victim, she stands her ground and although she submits to Leonard’s care at different times, it is her choice to do that.  (His care, of course, reflects the sad fact that at that time treatment for mental illness was primitive at best, and often cruel by present-day standards.)  But without taking anything away from Virginia’s genius, Cunningham inverts the trope about a selfless woman jettisoning her career to serve the creative needs of some man who took her for granted.  This novel shows a husband who did everything possible to support Virginia, possibly because he realised she was a genius.  She was certainly a better writer than he was (and she tells Alice so, in one of her ghostly visitations.)

Virginia could not have achieved what she did had Leonard not enabled it.  He looked after her for nearly 30 years. We who love her work owe him.

This Devastating Fever is about keeping a sense of perspective and the different kinds of love we need to get us through our days.

I bought This Devastating Fever the week it was released in September last year. It was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and has just been longlisted for the 2023 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary Award longlist.  Inexplicably, it was passed over for the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin.

This list of other reviews is sourced from Sophie Cunningham’s website. Some of them are paywalled:

Canberra Times (2022) – This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham review – The parallels of history cast anew
The Conversation (2022) – Sophie Cunningham’s pandemic novel admits literature can’t save us – but treasures it for trying
Sydney Morning Herald (2022) – It took 16 years to write – good thing this book is a beautiful, significant read
The Saturday Paper (2022) – Sophie Cunningham – This Devastating Fever
Sydney Review of Books (2022) – Sophie Cunningham’s Orbits

Brona reviewed it too.

Also see Bill’s review of the Voyage Out at The Australian Legend.

Cunningham’s previous novels were Geography (2004), and Bird (2008), and I have also read some of her NF: Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy (2014) and City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest (2019). (Links go to my reviews).

Update 13/12/23: Tasmanian artist Rebecca Rowe’s artwork based on This Devastating Fever has won the Storyteller Prize in the Biblio Art Prize this year: like the book, it’s a work of sheer genius. See it here.

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