Resistance by Val McDermid

 

Art by Kathryn Briggs

Publisher: Profile books

Title in the Wellcome Collection

Graphic Novel

160 pages

 

Blurb

It's the summer solstice weekend, and 150,000 people descend on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. At first, a spot of rain seems to be the only thing dampening the fun - until a mystery bug appears. Before long, the illness is spreading at an electrifying speed and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Can journalist Zoe Meadows track the outbreak to its source, and will a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?

A heart-racing thriller, Resistance imagines a nightmare pandemic that seems only too credible in the wake of COVID-19. Number one bestseller and queen of crime Val McDermid has teamed up with illustrator Kathryn Briggs to create a masterful graphic novel.

 

Review

You might wonder what possessed me to read a book about a pandemic while living through a pandemic. Good question. I mean, if I want to know how the world reacts to a deadly disease, I just need to turn to my Twitter feed. It is almost as if my curiosity is rather morbid.

Morbid or not, I can’t deny I was curious how a writer like Val McDermid might approach the pandemic. But that was before I discovered that this story was written and performed as a radio play a few years before I first heard the word ‘Covid’. That knowledge was rather disturbing. So much in this story reminded me of everything we’ve been through over the past eighteen months. Especially the early denial of anything really serious happening and governments dithering before taking decisive action was all too familiar. After reading this book I guess we can only be grateful Covid isn’t quite as nasty as the bacterium in Resistance. Because the reason we’re still more or less functioning as a world and haven’t faced larger loss of life has little to do with our leaders being on the ball. While Covid has been devastating, it (so far) isn’t horrific enough to produce the scale of death and destruction as described in this book. Unfortunately, that doesn’t fill me with confidence that should things get worse, or should we face a similar but more aggressive epidemic, we will be able to handle it.

I’m not usually a graphic novel reader and I’m not sure if that is going to change. But, for a story as horrific as this the fact that words tend to hit me harder than images meant that graphic was the right way to go. Not that the fear, devastation, and despair are in any way subdued, far from it. But it would have been more difficult (if not impossible) to make my way to the end of this story if everything had been detailed in words.

This cautionary tale is, as I said before, all too realistic, and as such not particularly hopeful. Given everything the world is facing right now, it is a timely tale too. While it is all to tempting to stick our heads in the sand, get on with our lives, and hope that the various disasters approaching us won’t hit during our lives, the time for such an attitude (if it ever existed) is well and truly over. So maybe, while they may be hard to read, we need more, not fewer books like this one. Because we are in dire need of anything that might make more of us think about what we’re doing to our planet and each other. Think first and then, very rapidly, change our ways.

A girl can hope.