Loading the Dice

A novel by Janette Turner Hospital is an event. Although her new book comes with a disclaimer, suggesting that it should be read as a thriller, there will be high expectations. Even with its cumbersome title, for which the fact that it’s a quotation from Daniel Defoe doesn’t compensate, Due Preparations for the Plague claims attention. Thrillers suggest plot-driven entertainments. Some are relatively undemanding: the sort of thing sold in airport book-shops. This one is too unsettling to be entertainment, and, because its central event is the fate of passengers on a hi-jacked plane, it won’t be a big favourite as an airport novel.

‘It sometimes seems that our whole planet has swung into the fog belt of melodrama.’ The words are Graham Greene’s, but they could equally well come from Turner Hospital. She has always been drawn to that dangerous edge where the safety fence of civilisation fails. She writes exceptionally well about fear. Like Alfred Hitchcock, she sometimes uses such moments for reversals of expectation: sometimes the terror is self-created. In Due Preparations, such a moment comes when the central character, a young American woman who has survived all kinds of threats and physical ordeals, has a panic attack in a Manhattan cab when she sees the driver’s face in the rear vision mirror and reads his name: Ibram Siddiqi.