Ana V.

I absolutely loved this book. I already knew Herbert was a master of the genre, a man that has achieved in writing few have achieved, and I knew he wrote the "Dune" series, but when I took The White Plague off the shelve, I really didn't make the connection between Frank Herbert the author of this book, and THE Frank Herbert.

Good thing I realised it at the middle of the book, when I took another look to see who wrote this amazing story, and I was like : "oh. now it makes sense. now you tell me."

Of course, the plot is really good.

This guy's wife and children, O'Neill's, are blown up by an IRA bomb, on May 20, 1996. He immediatelly goes insane, and his mind shatters into different personalities, from which one is a mad man that is decided to make the world pay for what has been done to him. Because he was a molecular biologist, he is an apt scientist and he creates a plague that only affects women, the men being the carriers. He releases this plague into three countries - Ireland, England and Libya. He asks the governements to bring every emigrant back in the country and to let the virus take its course, so they feel the way he felt when his family was killed.

Because they are on a search to find him, he goes to Ireland to hide. He decides to get hired as a scientist in the project that is developed for counterattacking the virus he created, so he can sabbotage the results. Unfortunatelly for him, he is already suspected to being the terrorist, and he is sent to Ireland in the company of a priest, a boy and an IRA bomber, the same one that detonated the bomb that killed his wife and children.

In the end, it's not just about how a man's mind goes mad because his family was taken away from him, it's also about how countries react to such a threat - a plague that was created by man and released in the world without remorse. What do they go then? Do they exterminate every human being that is infected? Do they wipe those countries off of the face of the world? Or do they stay and do nothing? Is this a casus belli? Or is it not?

Of course, the book was written with Herbert's usual flawless techinique, making the reader enter a world of his own, but not his own entirely. What if this could be true?

xoxo