In Review: November 19, 1997

Biological warfare and death in New York City
Richard Preston *83 turns to fiction for his new scare story

The Cobra Event
by Richard Preston *83
Random House, $25.95

RICHARD PRESTON HAS WRITTEN a deliberately alarming (not to mention filmable) first novel. As with his bestselling nonfiction book, The Hot Zone, on the Ebola virus, The Cobra Event concerns a medical threat to society. Its focus is black biology, which Preston defines succinctly as "the creation of advanced biological weapons using methods of genetic engineering and biotechnology." It is an issue which Preston takes seriously. The question is, why has he, a veteran of John McPhee '53's Literature of Fact course and an accomplished nonfiction writer, chosen a fictional approach to this weighty subject? One can well imagine that the greater leeway afforded by fiction and the relative freedom of being bolstered, but not bound, by facts could be particularly liberating when writing about such sensitive, technical material. Because fiction enables the author to create characters and events, it can allow him to protect his sources and classified information. Also, a contrived plot might garner a wider audience and a more exciting movie option. Then again, perhaps Preston was drawn to the new challenges fiction presents for him, or its potential for fun. In any event, the question is whether The Cobra Event succeeds as entertainment or enlightenment--or, as Preston no doubt hopes, as both.
The Cobra Event is a hot book. What makes it hot has nothing to do with its literary merits, for neither Preston's medical sleuth characters nor his serviceable hardboiled detective story prose are in any way extraordinary. The Cobra Event is enormously readable, and engineered as carefully as the bioweapons it discusses. It is filled with graphic descriptions of autopsies and of people eating themselves that are almost camp in their goriness, and high-tech computerized virus detectors that are like fabulous magical toys. There is an understated romantic subplot that is essentially superfluous, and a nod to Preston's degree in English literature in the names of his characters--Austen, Pascal, Hopkins. But High Art it is not. What makes The Cobra Event hot is its subject matter, which is extraordinary, as is Preston's mastery and clear communication of this complicated field.
Wisely, he prefaces his story with an explanation of "The Reality Behind the Cobra Event." He is well aware that his novel gains weight from its basis in fact, and is in effect a vehicle for those facts. He writes, "The nonfiction roots of this book run deep. . . . The characters and story developed here are fictional, not based on any real person or contemporary events, but the historical background is real, the government structures are real, and the science is real or based on what is possible." He warns ominously, "The dark apple hangs on the tree."
Here's the situation: two strange, unaccountable deaths occur in New York City. The first victim is a homeless person known as Harmonica Man who lives in the subway. The second case, with which Preston opens his narrative, is that of Kate Moran, a 17- year-old student at an Upper East Side girls' school. Within hours of her first cold symptoms, she is chomping her own tongue and lips and writhing in a fatal seizure on the floor of her school bathroom.
Enter Alice Austen, M.D., the 29- year-old daughter of a retired police officer from New Hampshire who grew up reading Nancy Drew stories. She flies up from the Epidemic Intelligence Service's headquarters in Atlanta to investigate. It is somewhat fantastic that two apparently unrelated deaths would be enough to trigger an investigation with the Centers for Disease Control, and that a connection between them would be made so quickly--but that is how Preston's book works.
At the autopsy of Kate Moran, described in lurid detail, Austen finds the girl's brain turned to jelly. She spends the next 24 hours following every possible lead in the case--exploring Kate's collection of boxes in her room in her parents' upscale loft and creeping under Houston Street to Harmonica Man's fetid subway home. (Preston conveys just how smelly medical detective work can be.) A third death, of an antique-dealer on Staten Island, provides a missing link. Somewhat unbelievably, there are no dead ends in Austen's whirlwind initial investigation. It doesn't take her long to conclude that a murderer with a precise mind is behind this strange outbreak of autocannibalistic seizures. She sounds an alarm, and with miraculous speed, she is backed up by an amazing special forensic unit of the FBI which Preston calls Reachdeep. The assembled team of scientists and agents sets up headquarters on Governors Island, with helicopters and unlimited high-tech gadgetry at its disposal.
The rest, as they say, is just details. We suspect that eventually Austen and her cohorts will track the killer, though we don't know exactly how. Their route seems too direct, which may be why Preston throws in the somewhat ridiculous--but filmable--chase scene through the subway tunnels of the Lower East Side at the climax. Thriller devotees accustomed to more convoluted plots may find Preston's too straightforward.
At its best, The Cobra Event evokes the real-life medical mysteries in Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives. The predominantly nonfiction "Invisible History" sections, which provide reports on the development and stockpiling of catastrophic quantities of bioweapons (including nontreatable smallpox) in Iraq and Russia, among other countries, are every bit as disturbing as Preston intends them to be. They are also more compelling than his fiction. Entertainment or enlightenment? Fiction or fact? Take your choice.
--Heller McAlpin '77
Heller McAlpin is a novelist and freelance critic whose reviews appear regularly in The Los Angeles Times and Newsday.

A novel, spiced with good sex scenes, illuminates the history of the Balkans

Montenegro
by Starling Lawrence '65
Farrar Straus, $23

AUBERON HARWELL IS AN UNLIKELY SPY for an ambitious English peer, who sends him to Montenegro before World War I to find out the Austrian Empire's intentions in the Balkans. As cover, Harwell plans to collect botanical specimens.
Montenegro, now known as Crna Gora, is the one Balkan state that was never conquered by the Turks. It is an exotic setting for a thriller, as Rex Stout demonstrated years ago when he sent his hero, Nero Wolfe, back to the land of his roots.
Samuel Hynes, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, Emeritus, has maintained that one of the functions of fiction is to educate people about places and professions, and Montenegro does this admirably. The reader will begin, painlessly, while reading an exciting story, to understand what happened in Sarajevo in 1914, and get a glimmer of enlightenment on contemporary horrors in Bosnia.
And it is an exciting story. Harwell stays in a remote part of Montenegro for two months with a Montenegrin national hero, Danilo, and his wife, Sophia, and son Toma. He becomes attached to this family, falling chastely in love with Sophia, and comes to detest his work for Lord Polgrove. He perseveres, however, dealing with bandits on lonely mountain roads, Turkish frontier guards, Austrian soldiers, and an earthquake.
And there's lots of sex. In a flashback, Harwell recalls in detail a most astonishing scene in a London brothel, and later falls in love with an English schoolteacher.
Star Lawrence, editor in chief at W. W. Norton publishing company, plans to write more books about the characters in Montenegro.
--Ann Waldron
Ann Waldron is a freelance writer living in Princeton.

The Bible train

Finding God on the Train: A Journey Into Prayer
by Rick Hamlin '77
HarperSanFrancisco, $17

AMID THE SPECTACLE that's the New York City subway, Rick Hamlin '77 makes time every day on the A train to practice his faith: he reads from the Bible on the stretch from the 181st Street station to 125th Street, then on the train's five-minute express hurtle to 59th Street, he closes his eyes for his "time for God."
This certainly isn't Hamlin's only time for worship. But as he writes in this well-written and thoughtful spiritual autobiography, "this early-morning time or prayer feels like the most important. Without it my day would fall apart and I would forget who I am and what I want to do and what I believe."
In short chapters that describe pivotal spiritual experiences, Hamlin shares his journey of faith, from his early Sunday school efforts to praying to get through freshman year finals to a more sophisticated understanding of his relationship with God. And it's a journey that should resonate with readers, regardless of their religious bent.
--Robin L. Michaelson '89
Robin L. Michaelson is an associate editor at Bantam Books.

Verse from John Koethe '67's Falling Water

I think about the way our visions locked together
In a nightmare play of nervousness and language,
Living day to day inside the concentrated
Force of that relentless argument, whose words
Swept over us in formless torrents of anxiety, two
People clinging to their versions of their lives
Almost like children--living out each other's
Intermittent fantasies, that fed upon themselves
As though infected by some vile, concentrated hatred;
Who then woke up and planned that evening's dinner.
It's all memories now, and distance. Miles away
The cat is sleeping on the driveway, John's in school,
And sunlight filters through a curtain in the kitchen.
Nothing really changes--the external world intrudes
And then withdraws, and then becomes continuous again.

From the title poem of Falling Water, a volume of poetry by John Koethe '67 (HarperCollins, $22). Koethe is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

They fished paradise

The Striped Bass Chronicles: The Saga of America's Great Game Fish
by George Reiger '60
Lyons & Burford, $22.95


THE NATION'S most ubiquitous coastal game fish, the striped bass can be found from Nova Scotia to the Gulf of Mexico and from San Diego to Seattle. Conservation writer George Reiger '60 tells its story in a narrative that is various parts natural history, social history, personal history, and jeremiad.
Reiger first fished for stripers in the 1960s as a young naval officer stationed in Washington, D.C., and at Annapolis, where he taught English literature and the Vietnamese language (Oliver North was one of his students). Stripers were then so abundant in the Chesapeake that it was possible for him to catch them on the Severn River during the 10-minute intervals between classes. In the 30 years since he has seen their numbers wane as fisheries managers have tried, but usually failed, to satisfy the conflicting demands of recreational and commercial fishermen.
On the East Coast, striper populations collapsed in the 1980s in the wake of relentless overfishing, then recovered following a ban on their harvest; but Reiger believes that the government "biocrats" (his term) responsible for regulating their catch will bend to political pressures and again allow fishermen to take too many. He also laments the decline of West Coast stripers (a fishery that did not exist until the 1880s, when the species was transplanted from New Jersey) because of what he sees as a misguided policy that gives them short shrift in favor of indigenous species such as salmon.
At heart Reiger is a moralist. "Marcel Proust once observed that the only true paradises are those we've lost," he writes. "The striper's many attributes give us the possibility of proving that one of those paradises can be regained--but only if we have the will to manage the fish for optimum yield."
--J. I. Merritt '66

Beautiful maps to ponder and peruse
AN ATLAS OF RARE CITY MAPS: Comparative Urban Design, 1830-1842, by Melville C. Branch '34 *36, has been republished by Princeton Architectural Press. This lavish and engrossing book, originally issued by Arno Press in 1977, includes 40 detailed, hand-colored maps, many of which had been commissioned in the 19th century by the quaint-sounding Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, in England. All but four of the maps are of major European cities; the exceptions are Calcutta, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. In each map's accompanying text, Branch delivers a concise history of the city, focusing on growth and its effects on building and planning.
Branch, a pioneer in the field of urban planning--he was the first to receive a Ph.D. in planning (from Harvard in 1949) and helped establish Princeton's Bureau of Urban Research --is a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California.

Books Received
DANTE'S EPISTLE TO CANGRANDE, by Robert Hollander '55 (University of Michigan Press, $34.50)--one in a series titled "Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts." In the book, Hollander makes a case for the authenticity of Dante Alighieri's epistle to Cangrande which has been debated among Dante scholars the last few years.
BOCCACCIO'S DANTE AND THE SHAPING FORCE OF SATIRE, by Robert Hollander '55 (University of Michigan Press, $42.50)--a collection of essays that examines Dante's influence on the creator of the Decameron. Hollander is a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton.
ISLAM IN THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, by Richard Brent Turner *86 (Indiana University Press, $39.95 cloth, $18.95 paper)--an exploration of the religious experiences of black Muslims in America. Turner is an assistant professor of theology at Xavier University in New Orleans.
IN YOUR DREAMS: FALLING, FLYING AND OTHER DREAM THEMES, by Gayle Delaney '72 (HarperCollins, $13)--a dream dictionary in which Delaney offers tools to analyze dreams. Delaney is codirector of the Delaney and Flowers Dream Center in San Francisco.
HOW THE FARMERS CHANGED CHINA: POWER OF THE PEOPLE, by Kate Xiao Zhou *94 (Westview Press, $69.50 cloth, $22 paper)--an argument that claims the Chinese farmers, rather than the communist leaders, spurred China's recent economic growth. Zhou, who was persecuted in China during the Cultural Revolution, is an assistant professor of Chinese politics and comparative politics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her insights are based on firsthand observation of farmers and their initiative in producing and selling excess goods.

paw@princeton.edu