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Sally Blakeney talks to versatile and much-travelled Janette Turner Hospital, who makes terrorism the theme of her seventh novel - - and her first thriller
Due Preparations for the Plague
By Janette Turner Hospital,
HarperCollins, 390pp, $45
JANETTE Turner Hospital, the Australian-born writer who has made a career from travel and displacement, is really a stay-at-home gardener. "It's like writing a novel on the landscape," she explains from her home in Columbia, South Carolina, where early flowering dogwoods and azaleas fill
her window.
To find Hospital, at 60, spreading fertiliser in the US south, where she is the University of South Carolina's professor of creative writing and distinguished writer in residence, is almost as mystifying as the words on the cover of her latest novel, Due Preparations for the Plague.
The title, stolen from a 1722 how-to-survive-the-plague manual by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, is pure Hospital. Her novels are rich with allusions to the likes of Dante, Boccaccio, Chretien de Troyes and Camus. "I try to cure myself of being literary," she confesses. When you put Milton into the mouth of a Sydney prostitute, as she did in The Last Magician in 1992, you make friends among avid readers, not bestseller lists.
This seventh novel is her first thriller (not counting the one she published in 1990 under the pseudonym Alex Juniper as a therapeutic exercise after she was mugged at knifepoint). Reading like a September 11 novel, though conceived in 1998, it is a frightening exploration of the moral ambiguities that lie at the heart of the war on terrorism. Its territory is chillingly familiar: Arab terrorists hijacking an aircraft and entombing 10 hostages in a sarin gas-filled bunker. An edgy page-turner that mixes spy thriller with psychological romance, it owes its tone to the great writers who have wrestled with the theme of individual survival in a hostile world since the time of Beowulf.
Hospital's previous fictions about border refugees, theoretical physics, corruption in high places and religious cults have followed current affairs. Here her traveller's instinct pointed in the direction...