Once Upon A Fever

We’re in London, but not as we know it. There are no trains in this Lundain (sic), no cars, buses, theatres, bright lights. Electricity is generated by wooden waterwheels. We’re told things have been different since The Turn, but what happened then is never explained. There’s poverty, squalor and disease. An ambulans drawn by stags hurries the sick to hospital.

Society was once controlled by several guilds. Now only two remain: the Financiers and the Methics.  There’s a neat irony in Angharad Walker’s alternative name for doctors; those caring for the sick are guided by very different moral values from any principles we might recognise as ‘ethical’.  For methics, the target is the elimination of feelings, since as a Senior Methic says, ‘Disease begins with feelings…. they affect the body in endless fascinating ways’. Cleanse people of feelings, and you rid the world of physical and mental suffering. 

Ani (11) and her sister Payton (13) grew up far from Lundain, in the Isles. When their mother contracted water fever, their methic father brought the family to King Jude’s Hospital in Lundain, vowing to devote his career to finding a cure through research. Mother lies asleep, submerged in a stone tomb-like container, awaiting a cure. She has been there for several years. Payton now believes her father’s work is leading nowhere – he seems to have lost interest. Living in the Hospital, she determines to learn everything she can to become a methic herself and find the cure; she is so able that she already knows more than most of the junior methics. Ani is just as devoted to finding a cure for her mother, but is more impatient than her sister. Her actions are often fuelled by anger, say the methics, who decide that such a feeling must be controlled by medication and then removed.

Ani’s adventurous path takes her out into the city, where she spends time inside Hyde Gardens, an area abandoned to its natural state. Here, she meets three ‘wilders’ – two adults and a boy, who become her friends. These wilders are living out an older way of life. The adults believe in engaging with their feelings. Far from searching for suppression and a kind of passivity, they look for a life where feelings are held in balance. Through her new friends and the living Gardens themselves, Ami begins to heal, learning how to enjoy – and yet control – the intensity of her feelings. 

Meanwhile, Payton’s journey takes her into the world of the brilliant methic Jenipher Blake, the youngest Guild Master in history. It becomes clear that Payton has unique gifts which could be invaluable to Blake in her research.  And so begins a complex story in which conflicting beliefs and actions test the values of the Guilds.

It’s at this level that the London we know and the Lundain of the novel connect, or even collide. What seems a distant dystopian world may become an illuminating contrast for discerning young readers; a means of thinking about our own society. Making such comparisons could be difficult for Chicken House’s suggested readership of 12+.  There is a graphic plot often involving violent and almost magical action; but that action is driven by complex ideas which need to be understood for the impact of this unusual parallel world to be felt.