Bleak Midwinter

by Peter Millar

In an Oxford hospital, intern Rajiv Mahendra encounters a patient with rare symptoms that are disturbingly familiar. In India, the disease is known as bubonic plague. The last time it occurred on a large scale in Europe, it was known as the Black Death, killing nearly a third of the population. Driven by morbid curiosity, history student Daniel Warren slips into the hospital to see the patient, where he is discovered by a reporter from a local newspaper. In a misguided attempt to keep her quiet, Warren reveals that the patient had been working on a building site that was once an old plague pit. Could this long-dormant scourge have been reawakened? It seems impossible, but is it?

Genres: Thriller, Fiction, Adventure

305 pages, Paperback

First published January 22, 2001

About the author

Peter Millar is an award-winning British journalist, author and translator, and has been a correspondent for Reuters, Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph. He was named Foreign Correspondent of the Year for his reporting on the dying stages of the Cold War, his account of which – 1989: The Berlin Wall, My Part in its Downfall – was named ‘best read’ by The Economist. An inveterate wanderer since his youth, Peter Millar grew up in Northern Ireland and studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. Before and during his university years, he hitchhiked and travelled by train throughout most of Europe, including behind the Iron Curtain to Moscow and Leningrad, as well as hitchhiking barefoot from Dubrovnik to Belfast after being robbed in the former Yugoslavia. He has had his eyelashes frozen in the coldest inhabited place on Earth - Oymyakon, eastern Siberia, where temperatures reach minus 71ºC, was fried at 48ºC in Turkmenistan, dipped his toes in the Mississippi, the Mekong and the Nile, the Dniepr and the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhone, the Seine and the Spree. He crisscrossed the USA by rail for his book All Gone To Look for America and rattled down the spine of Cuba for Slow Train to Guantanamo. He has lived and worked in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow, attended the funerals of two Soviet leaders, been blessed six times by Pope John Paul II (which would have his staunch Protestant ancestors spinning in their graves), and he has survived multiple visits to the Munich Oktoberfest and the enduring agony of supporting Charlton Athletic. Peter speaks French, German, Russian and Spanish, and is married with two grown-up sons. He splits his time between Oxfordshire and London, and anywhere else that will have him.

Reviews

[Paula Mc Cune · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of descriptions of the Oxford area (if that interests you). I didn’t really feel a connection to the characters as I felt that they lacked depth. The storyline seemed to split and go off in another direction but enough suspense to keep the plot moving. Readable.

[Tecre · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I'm interested in reading about plagues instead I got boringly written conspiracy bullshit.

Really wished I DNF'd it after 50 pages when it was clear the author considers the fuckability of women the most important aspect in describing them.

[Joanne Sheppard · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bleak Midwinter by Peter Millar opens with a beautiful woman being murdered as she sunbathes by a hitman called Harold Hammerstein who aims to 'reduce her golden suntanned flesh to steak tartare'. He also 'grabbed hold of the elegant, gold-chained ankle [because despite being set around 2000 this supposedly stylish sophisticate sports accessories last seen in 1986] and pulled it to one side. Viciously. Leaving her legs splayed open at an obscene angle."

If you're thinking that this all sounds like a bad made-for-TV miniseries from 30 years ago and that I should have stopped right there, you'd be correct, but I was on a long car journey and my other books were in the boot so I ploughed on.

Despite the Florida prologue, Bleak Midwinter is mostly set in Oxford, where Daniel, a young American academic with no real personality and Therry, a local paper hack with a stupid name (she's the 'feisty', wisecracking type but hey, she has a kitten, so that means she has a soft side and is also, like almost every young woman who gets a mention in this book, 'pretty') team up to investigate a mysterious outbreak of bubonic plague discovered by Daniel's junior doctor friend, Rajiv. Rajiv was actually the most interesting character in the whole book by a country mile, but - spoiler alert - he dies (off-stage, to add insult to injury) near the beginning.

The bubonic plague plot was the main reason I picked up this book. Plague is something that's fascinated me for decades and I'm always intrigued at the notion of its return to the UK. Daniel and Therry are convinced the outbreak has been caused by a corrupt development company who have uncovered a dormant strain of the disease by digging up a former plague pit to build executive homes. This in itself is an interesting idea, but unfortunately it plays second fiddle to a different plot strand which is clunkily executed and nowhere near as engaging. Moreover, Millar seems far too interested in delivering a damning and at times embarrassingly snobby critique of rural house-building (the housing crisis is all just invented, people who live in new build houses are awful philistines and a saleswoman who works for the developer is a 'silly bitch' just for, well, doing her job) that frequently tips into Accidental Partridge territory. To give you a flavour of the level of subtlety, the developer's security firm is called Cerberus.

The dialogue throughout is largely terrible and littered with clichés. Everybody talks like a bad film script. The plot is a sort of hybrid between conspiracy adventure and post-Cold War spy thriller, but the two really don't sit easily together; instead of intertwining, one simply eclipses the other. The debunking of Daniel and Therry's various theories at the end mainly amounts to 'oh yes, I can see why you'd think that, but it was just a complete coincidence and actually this other terribly unlikely chain of events that you and the readers haven't really been engaging with because it's frankly paper-thin is behind it all. That far more interesting thread that you've been somewhat invested in? Red herring, and we're never speaking of it again. So, moving on...'

I wanted to like this book so much, so disappointment is probably a strong factor in my reaction to it here; it's much less annoying to expect a book to be terrible and be proved right than to have high hopes dashed. I rarely give very negative reviews for the simple reason that in most cases I stop reading books if I'm not enjoying them, and I never review a book I haven't finished. I probably should have done the same with this one.

[Kelsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this. I really did. I picked up this book because the author has my uncle's name and I was currently studying the plague bacteria in microbiology. I figured it'd be a perfect fit for me.

Unfortunately, I was never really able to get into the author's writing style and found myself growing bored quite often. I finally forced myself to finish the book last night... and i must stress the word force. One of the characters is just killed off, no explanation, no substance, nothing. The main character is just informed of his friend’s death… and that’s that… back to the conspiracy. In the last section of the book, it really took a wacky turn. It turns out, not all is as assumed; though the spread of the bubonic plague was in fact a conspiracy, it was an evil plan devised from remnants of Cold War Communists... ‘:-\. I think that if the author had stuck with the idea of a contagion being released into a large population and left the conspiracy/thriller aspects to the big boys, this book would have been much better. I did enjoy the author’s recreation of the Black Death and his thoughts on urban expansion.

[Vivienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did like the book but it was after a promising start became a rather formulatic thriller and I felt its characterisations were sacrificed for the kind of action you'd find in a film.

The book is made up of short chapters, each of a different scene and while this did work to give a sense of speed in which events were taking place, it did feel choppy. One departure from and one addition to the 'cast' also seemed very poorly handled and I had wondered if my copy was missing a couple of chapters. I checked and it was all there. Not sure why in such a short book more time couldn't have been taken but perhaps an editor got happy with the blue pencil.

Having said that the book kept me riveted for an afternoon and was a quick paced, easy read. The plague history aspects were well presented as was the cityscape of Oxford and its locality.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

The plot – farfetched and melodramatic in places – was only alright. The writer’s style was okay; he could never be accused of being avant garde. His use of metaphor also became repetitive too – he seemed particularly obsessed with the phrase (already hideously overused in the media) the ‘rape of the countryside’ which, while I appreciate the problems behind it, I find people tend to use lazily and because it sounds intelligent. Suffice it to say, it sounded less intelligent the 103rd time Millar used it in this novel. (Ok, slight exaggeration.)

Read my full review at: http://emilykmorrison.wordpress.com/2...

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

tapped in the isbn and *drum roll* it's a K-Pax cover on show! Bleak Midwinter is what I've got.

[Susu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comeback of the plague rattles Oxford. Entertaining and slightly overdone at the same time.