I picked this up mostly, I'll be real, for a laugh. I had just been doing some reading from a 2005 National Geographic article on the Bird Flu panic (which, incidentally, cited the man of the hour himself, Dr. Fauci). It's a really interesting read in retrospect, and if you can get your hands on it, I'd recommend it. Many of the points about how viruses form, mutate, and spread will all be incredibly familiar to anyone living on planet earth since the year of our Lord 2020, but it's still interesting and even a bit eerie to read about the concerns epidemiologists were having even back then about how overdue the world was for another pandemic.

Enter Dr. Daniel Kalla of Canada. I assume he either also read the then contemporary National Geographic story or that 'killer flu' was part of the medical zeitgeist at the time because the backbone of his novel mirrors it all the way down to the ominous 'we're overdue for another pandemic' byline the story opens with.

Much of the medicine in 'Pandemic' (coronavirus, N-95 masks, 'stop the spread,' quarantine, and so on) feels like little Easter eggs to we readers of today, and I delightedly pointed each of them out to my indulgent partner as I read.

Unlike our Covid-19, the 'Killer Flu' of Kalla's pandemic is lethal in 25% of those that catch it (perhaps the reason the people populating Kalla's fictional world more willingly stay at home and help out with contact tracing? Either that or Kalla just had more faith in his fellow man than turned out to be realistic) but much less contagious than 'the 'rona'.

Another key difference is that the pandemic in Kalla's world was intentional. I know there are those 'plandemic' believers out there in our real world who would probably view 'Pandemic' as prophetic or even as non-fiction, but for the sake of this discussion let's try to stay on one plane of reality at a time.

Kalla made a few interesting choices when it came to his own fictional 'plandemic.' First of all it must be noted that while many of our primary characters are Americans, Kalla is Canadian. And in true Canadian fashion there are no punches pulled when it comes to punching down on America by way of cultural appropriation.

Now, when I say cultural appropriation I mean that in a very academic sense. I'm not sure how much time Kalla has spent in the US, but he writes about it like someone who got their knowledge of the country purely through watching action films from the 90s and early 2000s. Or maybe honestly just Independence Day. Now me, personally, I found this to be both refreshing and kind of hilarious. In fact, I'd go so far as to make sections of this required reading in a class on the topic so that Americans could kind of feel how cringy (at the very least) it is to be on the recieving end of cultural appropriation.

For instance, here are a few snippets just to give you a sense:

"Haldane had never before been to an air force base, let alone one which was set to launch a critical military operation, but the sense of purpose was palpable in the air. He welled with patriotism." (p.321)"

And how about another gem while we're here:

"The president leaned back in his leather chair. In his early fifties, he wore a navy suit with an open collared light blue shirt, and he towered half a head above the others at the table. He had thick salt and pepper hair, expressive gray eyes, and a prominent chin. He wasn't classically handsome, but he had a commanding and compassionate countenance. Haldane decided he had a perfectly presidential face for photo-ops." (p.262)

One more just for fun, coming at the end of a scene where our two doctor heroes have been in a bioterrorism meeting with the President and his cabinet and others. They've just found the bad guys' base and then the President says this at the end of their negotiations:

"That leaves us forty-eight hours to catch these sons of bitches," the President said. "I authorize you to use any and all means necessary to do just that." He looked around the faces at the table and then stared directly into the camera. "Am I clear?" (p.268).

Putting it another way, in his Wikipedia article it says that Kalla's interest in writing started after he took a film course. Yeah, I got that. This could easily be a flick from 2007 starring Tom Cruise as the main doctor with Scarlet Johannson as the leading lady.

Which leads nicely into my first gripe with 'Pandemic.' Not the cheesy writing? you may gasp. No. The cheesy writing was great. 10/10; exactly what I wanted from this. My first gripe is that according to Dr. Daniel Kalla the world is made up of two, and only two, groups of people: skinny, stunningly beautiful people, and schlubby fat people. And that's it. I really mean it. About a third of my way through 'Pandemic' this stood out to me so much that I started keeping track and I'm pretty sure that literally the only character in the entire novel who isn't in exactly one camp or the other is this one bureaucrat Haldine and co. meet in NYC who gets to be 'bony.'

My issue with this isn't even the very un-PCness of it all; this was published in 2005, after all. My issue is in just how odd it feels for specifically a doctor to write people this way; you'd think given how closely to the public a doctor works he'd have more of a sense of how diverse humans can be in terms of looks? I dunno. It was weird.

My really big issue with 'Pandemic' was this weird tick wherein every single time our protagonists (all medical professionals, by the way, and written BY A MEDICAL DOCTOR) had to wear face masks because (gasp) they were dealing with a super deadly flu epidemic (the title 'pandemic' is also slightly misleading, but forgivable) they would whinge about it. It was a thing.

Most aggregiously, at one point two of the doctors are UNDER QUARANTINE (at a 5 star hotel) and continuously meet up with each other during that time and then one of their colleagues comes to visit--just on a whim-- and then this happens:

"Haldane opened the door. Duncan McLeod stood on the other side with a surgical mask covering his scraggly beard. He wasn't gowned. And a baseball cap stood in for the shower cap he was supposed to wear. [...] He sauntered into the room and flopped into the loveseat behind the desk [...] Mcleod pulled off his mask. "Christ, I'm tired of these things. I know you're no risk to me." (p.258-259)

Sometimes you just have to say to yourself: what the fuck.

Kalla. My dude. Why?

The political messaging was pretty unambiguous and kind of slaps the reader in the face, so I don't think it's giving anything away to say I came away from 'Pandemic' with the following understanding:

Kalla does not like American interventionism, and also really wants the reader to understand that were a 'plandemic' to ever occur he would not be surprised if it were done in retaliation for that very interventionalism. BUT, he also wants to make it super, super clear that even though such retaliation would quite possibly come out of the Middle East that it would still be only extremists actually thinking that bioterrorism was a good and justified idea. To that end, we have one of the best characters in the novel, a detective in Cairo who is obsessed with Western detective stories and who also has this very on the nose quirk of constantly reminding everyone who will listen that terrorists make Islam look bad and he and the VAST MAJORITY of Muslims hate them.

Very subtle stuff, clearly. And definitely not a surprise that it wasn't an American who wrote it, particularly in 2005. We Americans can get pretty touchy about being portrayed as the 'bad guys.' And to be fair, America isn't 'the bad guy' in the novel; that's definitely the terrorists, but still, there's something there. A tone if you will. Something something America needs to stop being the world police and also is super oil-hungry and needs to please not drag the rest of the (ahem) 'definitely not questionable in any concievable way' rest of the 'Western World' into their nonsense. Or something like that. Like I said: there's a tone.

To summarize: this is pulp fiction at its finest. Absolutely everything you expect to happen happens. The people you expect to make it out do. There's lots of disaster porn for we degenerate connoisseurs of such ficitonal subject matter (as in: if you like movies like 'World War Z' or 'The Day After Tomorrow' you will like this). And the dialogue. Oh my god, the dialogue. I don't know what happened to Kalla at about the halfway mark of writing this, but it's about at that point that he stops trying to pretend these characters are real people (see the samples above).

If you, like me, want a little bit of catharsis after the fatigue of nearly 2 full years (TWO FULL YEARS) of real-world pandemic, you should read this. It's good schlocky fun.