The White Plague [Paperback]

Herbert is best known for his Dune novels. This one, set mostly in Ireland, is a slightly different meal. An American biologist, John Roe O'Neill, witnesses the murder by car bomb of his wife and twin daughters. In a rage, O'Neill sets out to wreak revenge not just on Irish terrorists, but the entire planet, especially the men. He creates a special virus that in effect produces a plague of unique proportions: it kills any women who are exposed to it, but leaves the men alive and healthy. A gender-bender of a conflagration. The entire political landscape of earth is upset, as well as the economy, the security and the temperament of everybody. O'Neill, calling himself the Madman, watches and sneaks about as the revenge spreads everywhere. But he is captured by fundamental Irish rebels and asked to help find a cure. By this time, he has a definite split personality, the old O'Neill burying itself inside the new man who is slowly going insane.

The top scientists give it their best shot at finding a cure for this plague, and it means that some unusual co-operation is required. Cultural relationships and international trust will never be the same again. Herbert has skillfully portrayed a very realistic scenario of worldwide terrorism tactics and the aftermath of it all. It is possible, he argues, that one person, in a fit of personal rage, could afflict the whole planet like this. It is possible, he further prophesizes, for humankind to extricate itself from such a huge disaster only by supreme co-operation and a new trust. But Herbert also shows us here how mankind rarely trusts on that scale, and the fact that political instability lead to the plague in the first place, by putting someone like the Irish terrorist Joseph Herrity into the path of O'Neill. You have to wonder what it was really like in Europe during the great bubonic plagues of the Middle Ages and the 1600's. Another factor worthy of note here is the fact that women are the victims: hasn't that been the basic way of history so far? Men victimizing, and then over-idolizing their womenfolk?

You might expect that O'Neill would have been more specific in his revenge: instead of women he might have selected, for example, all Irish nationalists. Okay, it would require a more specific virus program than genders, but this is speculative fiction. Nonetheless, Herbert reasons that since O'Neill lost his women, he is determined to take away all other women from all other men. A gruesome poetic justice, in his demented eyes. Also, we have to wonder not if this could happen like this, but why it has not happened like this already. Even the most deviated terrorist must think about his or her own when plotting such destruction. And running throughout the narration is the picture of the Irish themselves as a fatalistic and vengeful people, ready to slaughter their own in order to give it to the oppressor (ie the English). That is a classic portrait of every terrorist anywhere.

Frank Herbert is one of my favorite authors, and this book is a major reason why. The plot is briskly-paced, well written, and touches many of the most troubling issues of our time.

Herbert's novel shows an impressive grasp of Irish lore, and he integrates, rather clumsily, historical archetypes (Mad Sweeney, Diarmuid and Devorgilla, the Fianna, rebels and crazed visionaries galore) into his story. (By the way, he never explains what the "Finn Sadal" stands for in their name, but Fenian and "sadall"--Irish for animal or "squat person" seems apt!) He also over-estimates the power of the Church, and attributes to it a confused mixture of irrelevance and dominance. The whole papal subplot seems to veer off wildly and seems forgotten. The trek across Ireland slows the plot, and what all the quotes from fictional and real people have to do with the chapters gains no clarification. A recommended updating of the genetic code-meets-Irish terrorism angle is Henry Porter's novel "Remembrance Day," about two decades later on the political and scientific front, if before the breaking of the genome.

Reading Herbert reminds me that so much of SF depends more on the excitement of ideas at the expense of satisfying characterisation. Too much of the story's wasted on superfluous people, names, descriptions, backgrounds which matter little. Prominently featured scientists trying to find the cure, for example, get attention early on but then are relegated to barely a mention; horrendously stereotypical "stage Oirish" dialogue by cardboard IRA men undercuts genuinely ambitious attempts by Herbert to analyse terrorist thinking. You get little sense of what "ordinary" folks suffered in the world of "Panic Fires" and mass barricades, or how goods (and weapons) would have been traded and daily life would have stumbled on. Many of the characters are too far removed in labs, the White House, the Papacy, and isolation to convey what the plague world would have felt like, and this detachment weakens the novel's force.

Like Michel Houellebecq's "The Elementary Particles," a massive scientific restructuring of global society gains barely a nod until the end of the book, when far too much is crammed into a few pages. I felt like a sequel could have done more justice to the fascinating drama of a planet with 10,000 men to a woman.