Dave's The Carriers

Dave's latest effort, The Carriers, is something of a return to form for the reclusive novelist.  After the commercial failure of his nonfiction opus Entertaining Anecdotes from The Lives of U.S. Senators Told from the Perspective of Someone Who Urgently Needs to Urinate, Dave retreated to a rental apartment in Osaka and ignored all communications for 14 months, to the consternation of his readers and the wider literary world.  But when Dave emerged last summer, pale and blinking in the bright August sunlight, he held in his hands a typewritten manuscript running to some 2,200 pages.  Since then the book has been laboriously translated into English from a private language that Dave invented and then partially forgot, and it has been stripped of the many passages that Dave copied verbatim from Entertaining Anecdotes.  The result is The Carriers, one of the greatest novels ever written about illness and the struggle for human connection.

Set in a thinly fictionalized Victorian England, the book chronicles the appearance and rapid spread of a devastating sexually transmitted virus.  People who are infected go through a symptomless (but contagious) stage and then develop terrible lesions, debilitating organ failure, sterility, and in many cases premature death.  But not everyone is vulnerable:  10-15% of the population is completely immune.  The virus can't gain a foothold in their bodies, and they neither experience symptoms nor transmit the disease.

But a much smaller fraction of the population has a different response:  their bodies never develop the symptoms of the disease, but they remain contagious for their entire lives, exposing anyone they have sex with.  For some time, the existence of these "carriers" is a matter of scientific dispute, and here Dave weaves an enthralling story about scientists and policymakers and their grim efforts to understand the disease and stem its tide.

But the book really gets going about a third of the way through, when the existence of carriers is proved conclusively and the government implements "the Programme"—a policy of isolating carriers from the rest of the population for the remainder of their lives.  (It is thought unnecessary and cruel to isolate people who are exhibiting symptoms, since there is no danger of contagion other than through sexual contact.  On the other hand, temporary quarantines are set up for people thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they don't transmit it before the symptoms set in.)

The problem is that carriers are almost impossible to identify unless they turn themselves in.  Charles Stonton, the administrator of the Programme, launches a controversial campaign to track the carriers down using forced interrogation and peremptory detainment.  Members of Parliament, Government officials, judges, and doctors are split on the effectiveness and legality of Stonton's tactics.  Stonton's hand is strengthened considerably, though, when he rounds up seven men who continued having promiscuous sex even though they very likely knew they were carriers.  But are the men representative of a larger trend, or are they sensationalized outliers, of the sort bound to crop up in a large country?

Dave's most compelling prose is reserved for the domestic dramas that ensue—women who fear that their husbands are carriers, husbands who without explanation stop having sex with their wives, wives who join their husbands (accused of being carriers) in isolation camps.  People are forced to put aside the platitudes and evasions they formerly relied on, because too much is at stake if they are wrong.  And people are forced to reexamine the assumptions that, in a more innocent world, seemed built on stone.  One woman bemoans the "strange new math that we have been forced to learn" and remembers fondly the days when math seemed "useless and remote, a chilly cathedral" that was compulsory to learn but not to use.

The book's triumph comes from its reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory aims.  First, it is unblinking and unromantic about the remorseless logic of the disease and the stringent measures taken to fight it.  But bizarrely, a deeply moving romanticism develops regardless, emerging from the struggles, painful failures, and rare triumphs that people find.  "Somewhere out there," a husband says, gesturing vaguely toward the New World, "There is a place where none of this has happened, where people can love freely and without consequence.  But we have been shattered, and all that is left for us is to make what we can of the pieces.  Of life itself."  He is speaking of his marriage, but it would be a fitting summary of this masterful novel.