cover image This Time of Dying

This Time of Dying

Reina James, . . St. Martin's, $24.95 (296pp) ISBN 978-0-312-36444-1

British writer James assays the impact of the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic on a disparate lot of Londoners in her ambitious debut novel. Told through the overlapping perspectives of an omniscient narrator and the protagonist, a London undertaker, the novel probes the street-level, personal toll of a contagion responsible for perhaps 100 million deaths worldwide. In October 1918, as WWI ebbs, Dr. Thomas Wey falls dead in a London street while trying to post a letter to local health officials warning of the coming epidemic. The attending undertaker, Henry Speake, discovers the letter, reads it and decides to keep it instead of posting it—an impulsive decision that roils him as the epidemic unfolds. As Henry weighs his culpability, his profession puts him at the center of the epidemic. Besides Henry, the characters—from the agoraphobic Lily Bird, who retreats to her bed to avoid germs, to the cynical and melancholy local physician, Dr. Lionel Tite—are eccentric, but not especially memorable. The novel's abrupt conclusion can be seen as either a flaw or a powerful reminder that death is ever untimely. (Apr.)