Waiting for the definitive COVID fiction

Representational image. (Photo: Noah Buscher via Unsplash)

Those of us fortunate enough to survive the worst pandemic to hit humanity in modern times have been witness to history. Yet, merely because we lived to tell the tale doesn't equip us to chronicle it. For that, we have to wait for those chosen to do so. Not historians, economists, government officials, but storytellers, for as Albert Camus said, "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."

Events that have shaken and shaped our world are often brought home to us more through story books, than books of history or documents of record.

We relate to the French Revolution's excesses and exhilaration more through Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859) with its memorable opening line, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s would be just a faraway event of little concern to us but for Ernest Hemingway's great novel For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940). The same probably holds true for the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s. Our nodding familiarity with that terrible event is almost entirely on account of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's tenderly crafted Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).

And it isn't just the wars. The agony of the Afghans is more vividly captured by Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner (2003) than any other document could hope to. Similarly, no one described the grinding poverty and exploitation of villagers in India better than Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (better known as Premchand) did in novels like Gaban (1931) and Godaan (1936).

It follows then, that the defining calamity of our times should find expression in fiction. In the last couple of years, there have been some books with COVID as the backdrop. Wish You Were Here (2021) by Jodi Picoult, Companion Piece (2022) by Ali Smith, Violeta (2022) by Isabel Allende, and Our Country Friends (2021) by Gary Shteyngart are among some of those that have been highly recommended. None though seems to adequately convey the pain and the agony of those nightmarish days.

I guess we will have to wait somewhat longer for the great COVID novels. Perhaps, it is as well that these books take time. Perspective is best when it comes from a distance. When we are a part of something big, we tend to describe what's obvious and what's most visible. A time when the public relations machinery of governments is working overtime isn't best suited to telling the millions of stories of loss and sufferings. In an era when the media often faithfully reproduces someone's version of the truth, even the newspapers are not enough.

Fiction gives voice to the marginal, the peripheral, and the subaltern in ways that history doesn’t or can’t. It also gives a chance for the loser's version to be heard. Truly great novels like Les Misérables (1862) or Middlemarch (1871) subtend an arch on the unilluminated corners of the lives around us. They also have the allure of a heightened dramatic moment that endures longer than strict history would allow. In the most memorable ones, the life of an individual becomes a diagnostic for the social history of the times.

That is really what we need from our COVID storytellers, books that will keep alive for future generations the meaning of this pandemic beyond the figures and the science of viruses. Sure, that's important. But the memory of the sirens of ambulances, the horror of human beings dying for lack of oxygen, the tales of bravery and selflessness and the apathy of politicians, they need a different telling. As the Gryphon in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) said, "No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time."