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A review by book_concierge
Fever by Mary Beth Keane
4.0
Few people recognize the name Mary Mallon, but virtually everyone knows of “Typhoid Mary.” This is her story.
Keane does a fine job with this work of historical fiction. Her Mary is at once sympathetic and infuriating. A strong-willed Irish immigrant who takes great pride in her cooking – with good reason – and who needs to work to support herself and her man, Mary feels attacked and persecuted when she’s told she is making her employers sick and must stop cooking for a living.
Mary is a woman trapped by biology, by society, by her own personality and desires. She was the first asymptomatic carrier of the typhus bacillus who was identified, but she was by no means the last. And she was the only one who was subjected to isolation for years on end. Keane explores what this enforced “arrest” and quarantine did to Mary. She begins defiant, not believing what she is told, questioning their authority to detain her and demand constant samples for testing. She sinks into despair as she is kept from contacting her friends or common-law husband, Alfred. She is depressed when letters from neighbors dwindle to nothing, and feels she’s been forgotten. She refuses small kindnesses because she does not want to be pitied; she has always worked and earned good wages to afford the nice things she owned, why should she take someone else’s cast-offs now?
Keane gives us a complex character facing an unimaginable scenario. While there were times I wanted to give her a good thrashing, I found myself mostly sympathetic to Mary’s plight. Someone I’ve always seen as a nefarious villain has now become, for me, a woman who was wronged by society. I could not help but think of the recent Ebola scares in the U.S. and how our society reacted – we imposed quarantines on those exposed, and some of them, just like Mary, refused to follow those restrictions.
Keane does a fine job with this work of historical fiction. Her Mary is at once sympathetic and infuriating. A strong-willed Irish immigrant who takes great pride in her cooking – with good reason – and who needs to work to support herself and her man, Mary feels attacked and persecuted when she’s told she is making her employers sick and must stop cooking for a living.
Mary is a woman trapped by biology, by society, by her own personality and desires. She was the first asymptomatic carrier of the typhus bacillus who was identified, but she was by no means the last. And she was the only one who was subjected to isolation for years on end. Keane explores what this enforced “arrest” and quarantine did to Mary. She begins defiant, not believing what she is told, questioning their authority to detain her and demand constant samples for testing. She sinks into despair as she is kept from contacting her friends or common-law husband, Alfred. She is depressed when letters from neighbors dwindle to nothing, and feels she’s been forgotten. She refuses small kindnesses because she does not want to be pitied; she has always worked and earned good wages to afford the nice things she owned, why should she take someone else’s cast-offs now?
Keane gives us a complex character facing an unimaginable scenario. While there were times I wanted to give her a good thrashing, I found myself mostly sympathetic to Mary’s plight. Someone I’ve always seen as a nefarious villain has now become, for me, a woman who was wronged by society. I could not help but think of the recent Ebola scares in the U.S. and how our society reacted – we imposed quarantines on those exposed, and some of them, just like Mary, refused to follow those restrictions.