The Plague Tales

by Ann Benson

Paperback, 1998

Status

Available

Call number

813

Publication

Dell (1998), Mass Market Paperback, 688 pages

Description

"Part historical novel, part futuristic adventure . . . chock full of curious lore and considerable suspense."--Entertainment Weekly It is history's most feared disease. It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead. Now, in a spellbinding novel of adventure and science, romance and terror, two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacterium--the invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague. In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There, he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death. . . . Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries. From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future, The Plague Tales is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction. For in 2005, humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past. Praise for The Plague Tales "Benson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Harrowing . . . Will give readers both nightmares and thrills . . . A carefully woven page-turner from which . . . Robin Cook and Michael Crichton could learn."--Library Journal "A hard-to-put-down thriller steeped in historical fiction and bio-tech sci-fi."--Middlesex News (Mass.)… (more)

Media reviews

School Library Journal

First time novelist Benson tells a parallel tale of 14th- and 21st-century England, centered on the ever-fascinating Bubonic Plague. Alejandro Canches, a 14th-century Spanish physician, becomes the Papal appointment to the English court of Edward III. He is consigned the task of keeping the court

alive during the Plague years beginning in 1348. The descriptions of treatments, daily life, and death during these terrible times are fascinating. Alternating chapters take place in 2005, a few years after the "Outbreak" and the end of antibiotic effectiveness against microbes. This is a world of biocops who shoot to kill if the infected try to escape, where transatlantic travel must be done in sterile gowns and masks, and "body printing" eliminates any semblance of privacy. Physician Janie Crow, in England for mandatory retraining since the drastic drop in population has rendered her surgical skills obsolete, accidentally unleashes the 14th-century plague bacillus on an ill-prepared London. This adventure grabs readers and carries them back and forth in time on the trail of the deadly bacteria. The blend of historical color and current biotechnology trends will have great appeal to young adults. It works as historical fiction, science fiction, or a technology thriller.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member McGrewc

Two novels from different centuries tied together by the plague. Different enough to be engaging with great characters.

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LibraryThing member Othemts

"America had civilization, and the standards of civilization were redefined as needed. England was civilized and civilized standards were not touched, ever." p. 147

LibraryThing member stubbyfingers

The is two interconnected stories about outbreaks of the bubonic plague in England--one set in the near future and one set in 1348. The stories were somewhat interesting with characters you might care about, but somehow I just couldn't suspend belief enough to get into this. And things just got

more outrageous as the story progressed--especially the near future story. For starters, characters fell in love and changed long-held beliefs at the drop of a hat. Then they did totally unbelievable things--I'm sorry, but I don't care who you are, when you find you lover-of-the-week's boss's corpse decomposing in your missing research assistant's hotel room, are you really going to cut off his rotting hand and put it in your briefcase for a ride on the subway instead of notifying some sort of authorities? And why do none of the doctors or microbiologists who specialize in infectious disease have any inkling of what Yersinia pestis is without looking it up? Did nobody with any medical background proofread this book before it went to print? A couple of doctors talk about intubating a patient but instead insert an orogastric tube. And that's just a few of the myriad examples of the ridiculousness found in this book. Perhaps if you have as little medical background as this author does, this won't bother you as much as it did me. A little more research on the part of the author and a lot more care taken with what a real person might do would've gone a long way with this story. Overall this book was ok, but the high points weren't that high and I found lots of it to be quite aggravating.

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LibraryThing member puckrobin

Interesting premise and written well enough to be interesting, but I needed to care far more about the characters in order to care more deeply about the story.

LibraryThing member chocolatedog

I'm as happy to suspend my disbelief as the next person, but this story is so full of holes it makes it hard to focus on the plot.

LibraryThing member crazybatcow

The characters are not very realistic, particularly in the modern era part of the book where people behave in ways that just don't make sense, and/or they respond/act/react in given ways only because they are required to do so to move the story forward. Like the director has an accident in a

bacteria 'safe room' and instead of dealing with it, covers it up to cover his azz... this after the world had already suffered a biomedical breakdown? Suuuurrreee...

And the huge phobia of "bodyprinting" is out of proportion to the activity itself. It is portrayed as the most HORRIBLE thing ever, and to be avoided at all costs, and almost worth getting shot to avoid, etc... but it is essentially just a digital scan of you. Granted you are naked when it happens, but seriously, is THAT the worst thing you can imagine in a post-bacterial plague world? seriously?

The book actually gets worse as it goes along - it becomes more far-fetched, and characters completely stop acting in normal ways. And I don't mean far-fetched in a science fiction kind of way, I mean far-fetched in that not only does nobody behave normally, they are not even consistent within their own "non-normal parameters". They have complete about-faces in their moral and political and social beliefs in a matter of a few hours - and for no clear "reason". I might accept an about-face if it were to save someone's life, or under extreme pressure, or because something of great magnitude happened... but not because you had a chat with someone, or because you were trying to avoid being, gasp, BODYPRINTED.

Anyway, the concept behind the story was interesting. Unfortunately, the characterizations are consistently terrible. And nobody in the entire book acts the way normal people would act in the same set of circumstances.

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LibraryThing member Mrs_McGreevy

So here ya go—a book that’s both a fascinating historical novel about a Jewish physician during the plague AND a futuristic medical thriller about a contemporary outbreak of the bubonic plague. You’ll love the characters, and both halves of this story are first rate.

LibraryThing member MarkLacy

Not bad, but in the second half of the book there were several things that stretched believability a little too far. Best aspect of the book was the way she wove the two stories, past and future, together.

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