"Paralleling two periods with end-times vibes, this extraordinary novel shows how turning to the past can ease present-day crises as a writer connects with literary ghosts during COVID."
If you love zeitgeisty novels about writers, you’ll be blown away by Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever. Following a 21st-century writer’s experience of researching and writing about Leonard Woolf, it’s an unexpected page-turner about making sense of the precarious present through delving into the past. Darkly comic and compelling, it exudes a level of invention Virginia Woolf would surely have applauded.
During a 2020 lockdown, Australian writer Alice returns to her unfinished, unfocused idea about Leonard Woolf. Through research conducted from 2004, and episodes relating Leonard’s life in the early twentieth-century, we journey to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where he worked as a colonial administrator, and where Alice converses with Imaginary Leonard over afternoon G&Ts. Imaginary Leonard frequently appears to Alice, declaring, “I have become quite invested in this project of yours”.
Later, Ghost Virginia appears to her, and Vita Sackville-West, who manifests herself, “breeches around her ankles…doing something to make the naked young woman doubled over before her breathe heavily”. Then there’s the Spanish flu epidemic, the rise of fascism, WWII, and Virginia’s suicide. Through this, as bush fires engulf Melbourne, as COVID-19 rages, Alice is also haunted by seeing a loved one fall prey to dementia and Parkinson's.
Wryly hilarious on writers’ proclivity to procrastinate and tumble into research rabbit holes, fascinating on Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and thought-provoking on the role fiction plays in our lives, it really is remarkable how This Devastating Fever manages to do so much, so brilliantly, while also having the pulling power of a page-turner. In addition, this marvel of meta-fiction draws pertinent parallels between the 20th and 21st-centuries, revealing the pervasiveness of environmental disasters, plagues and war. Quite simply, it’s a triumph.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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