Our strange need for pandemic novels

Our collective Covid hangover includes facing the inevitable influx of pandemic novels. Following a cameo in Ali Smith’s Orwell Prize–winning Summer and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, the pandemic takes centre stage this autumn in titles including Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat and Sarah Moss’s The Fell. Across the Atlantic, authors including Gary Shteyngart and Louise Erdrich are also taking up the gauntlet.

‘Practically speaking, the public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot,’ warned Virginia Woolf in her 1926 essay ‘On Illness’. ‘They would complain that there was no love in it.’ The trick for authors, then, is to add a dash of drama to the monotony inherent to illness and quarantine. Sarah Hall ups the ante in Burntcoat with a dystopian twist of a deadlier virus and heeds Woolf’s advice by adding a love story. Shteyngart, too, offers four romances among a group of eight friends isolated together in his Chekhovian Our Country Friends.