I’m too stressed out and prone to anxiety to want to read fiction about deadly diseases. I read enough about COVID-19 that I know as much as possible about how to keep myself and the people around me safe, but that’s the extent of my interaction. Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars-which depicts a maternity ward in a grippe-plagued hospital in 1918-was pushed quickly to publication to capitalize on the former group. As a result, the entire narrative feels like a flu-induced dream-a prophetic one we should all heed, lest we slip back in time.There are two types of people: those who are more likely to read plague fiction during a pandemic, and those who are less likely to do so. She omits quotation marks from dialogue so that spoken words drift in between thoughts. The characters themselves in The Pull of the Stars are thinner than those in some of Donoghue’s past books, but the nonstop action of the maternity ward is so compelling that it hardly matters. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.” Ought you really get a say in the affairs of the United Kingdom unless you’re prepared to lay down your lives for the king?” Julia shoots back, “Look around you … This is where every nation draws its first breath. An orderly dismisses the idea of women’s right to vote: “Don’t pay the blood tax, though, do you? Not like we fellows do. This novel is not for the squeamish.)ĭonoghue emphasizes parallels between the women suffering in hospitals and their husbands and brothers suffering in the trenches.
(Donoghue clearly reveled in her research on early 20th century medicine. The sickening prospect of a doctor sawing through a patient’s pubic bones during a delivery hangs over each woman who enters the ward. Lynn, their priorities lie with ensuring their patients’ abilities to bear more children, often at the expense of the health of women.
On the rare occasions when male doctors do appear, away from the watchful eye of Dr.
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