Book Review: The Great Mortality by John Kelly - Page 2

Kelly traces the path of the Black Death, describing its effect on towns, and looks at the science behind why it hit so hard at that particular moment, and where it has gone now. (The final chapter addresses "plague deniers," those who say that since bubonic plague presents so much less dramatically in the present day, and with a much lower frequency of pneumonic complications, it can't possibly be the same bacillus that nearly vanquished Europe.) Kelly's text, for the most part, succeeds in this storytelling task, although the scientific figures and epic cast of historical characters involved can occasionally be hard to follow as we move back and forth between locales along with the bacteria itself.

As someone who often reads on her commute, the book probably would have benefited had I been able to do a more focused reading. Occasionally, however, a clunky analogy would also pull me out of the book, like the gel reference in the earlier quote, or the atmospherically anachronistic description of a procession through a plague ravaged town as "the wintry morning burst into glorious Technicolor." Though these are minor issues, they pulled me out of the book's storytelling and back into the present day, unnecessarily.

It is trite but true to say that the Black Death changed the face of Europe. It altered the demography, destabilized institutional structures, improved social mobility, and created waves of migration inspired both by fear of the disease itself and fear of persecution, as the "other" was often blamed for the outbreaks. (Russia and Poland's Jewish populations can trace their roots back to the Plague banishments and exoduses.) Kelly succeeds wholly in helping us to understand the genesis of these changes.

These wide-ranging implications have also been of interest to the military community, which has used the event to try to understand human response to catastrophe. I found myself enthralled by these passages, and deeply curious about this type of military research, in spite of the fact that a plague pandemic may not be a perfect model for nuclear disaster:

The fear of contagion makes the psychology of plague different from the psychology of war. In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague, every man becomes an island — a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear, and despair.

By the time Kelly closes the book with the plague's retreat, I felt as though I had a much better understanding of my world. I had deepened my knowledge about medieval Europe and this specific plague outbreak, to be sure, but because of the book's humanity, I felt that I better understood not only history and science, but the human condition itself. The Great Mortality is a rarely dense, often compellingly readable book that leaves you feeling both wiser and exponentially more curious about the world.

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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