Rating: 
Summary: A mass-market thriller that masquerades as literary fiction
Review: The first quarter of Due Preparations for the Plague is very involving, as Hospital provides us with a tighty-plotted thriller that weaves together duel story lines from the past and present. Her characters deftly weave in and out of a story arc that is set in two time periods - 1987 and the year 2000. The story starts out dramatically with a traffic accident and the introduction of the two main protagonists Lowell and Samantha, the child survivors of an Air France hijacking. Then novel turns into what is literally a literary jigsaw puzzle as Lowell and Samantha try to piece together the truth behind the hijacking and the secret of the accident. I love the way Hospital readily switches from the present where Samantha, Lowell and the others from the Phoenix Group are trying to come to terms with what has happened, to the past where Tristian and Genevieve are about to board to the plane for New York. The best part of the novel, however, is the actual hijacking, which is told in such graphic, violent detail, and with so much authenticity that you really feel as though you are there on the plane. This is probably the most riveting and well-written chapter in the book, as Hospital conveys the continual take-off and landings against a backdrop of claustrophobic heat. It is also interesting that the actual hijacking section is seen though Tristian's point of view, as he is only one of a handful of passengers on the plane who survives. There are many twists and turns in the plot, as the pieces of the puzzle gradually come together and we learn whom the shadowy figures of Salamander, Sirocco are. The last half of Due Preparations for the Plague, however, is far too dialogue driven and stuffed with pretentiously dull sections on the nature of warfare. We don't really need to know the ins and outs of chemical warfare and the effects of saran gas on the nervous system; these passages simply detract from the main plot and characters. And we could also have been spared pages and pages of insufferable ramblings on the history of war - from Ancient Troy to Carthage, to Napoleon's France. I can understand that in a post 9/11 world, stories dealing with international terrorism, particularly terrorism dealing with Muslim extremism, are going to be told, which is fine, but we don't need stories on this subject that are over stuffed with literary pretentiousness. Due Preparations for the Plague is trying too hard to be something it is not, and unfortunately, in my opinion it is nothing more than "dressed up" pulp fiction. Michael
Rating:
Summary: Slumming among the Blockbusters
Review: This book has been billed as a literary thriller, but--and this is sad, as Ms. Hospital is a writer with considerable gifts--it works only fitfully as a thriller and never even a hint of a whiff of a little as a literary novel. It's turgid and stagy; the main characters are badly underdeveloped; and the climactic scene in the terrorist bunker is as staggeringly pretentious a bit of hooey as I've ever read. That said, the book has some lovely lines, some persuasive details, and enough narrative momentum that I did slog through to the end. Due Preparations reads like the work of someone a little too desperate to write a blockbuster . . . and at the same time Ms. Hospital asserts her literary ambitions and respectability by strewing the text with clumsy allusions to Defoe and Camus and and Boccaccio.
Rating: 
Summary: Unconventional Tale of Espionage
Review: This is the first work by Janette Turner Hospital I have read and her work is unlike anything I have read in the genre. Most works that center on international events of terrorism and espionage rely on a fairly brisk if not overtly blistering pace to tell their story. While their work is not stylistically similar, this author's writing is as different in rate of telling as John LeCarre is from other writers. This novel moves around the globe and through time, however the movement that is most important is the activity in the character's minds. The writer does move about in sequence from recollections to cotemporaneous descriptions of events, but it is primarily the sometimes fragmented or incomplete memories of young children that drive the tale. One of the most powerful sections of the book are the testaments given by hostages as they deal with their inevitable deaths. Instead of just recounting a tale of horror, Ms. Hospital creates a moving, painful and poignant memoir for victims of terror. There seems to be a tendency to parallel events of 9-11 with many books that include fictional events of terrorism. In this book there are elements that may cause a given historical event to be recalled, but to characterize this book as yet another exploitative take on events two years ago is to do the work an injustice. The style of this book may not appeal to everyone and it definitely does not seek to mimic others that are writing in the genre. It took me sometime to become comfortable with the writer's style and the cadence of her words; however it was time well spent.
Rating: 
Summary: A Psychological Page Turner!
Review: This latest by Ms. Hospital may not be as good as OYSTER, but it certainly compares well with any of the works of her contemporaries. Obviously influenced by the events of September 11, 2001-- as well as other cases of international terrorism-- the author has written an intriguing tale of espionage that will keep you reading. An Air France flight 64 was highjacked in September 1987. The hijackers let the 40 children leave the plane but all the adults on the flight perished-- or did they? Ms. Hospital introduces a number of characters, all of them connected in some way with the doomed flight and thus connected to each other: the surviving children, other relatives, friends, professionals et al. The time sequence begins in 2000, 13 years after the hijacking, and goes back and forth to before the 1987 date. I kept thinking, while reading this page-turner, that the writer had the movies in mind when she wrote this-- and that is not a criticism of the novel. I had difficulty casting the movie although surely Harrison Ford should have some role, if he is not too old to play Lowell Hawthorne. Ashley Judd might work as the character Lou, since they are both Southerners. If it's well directed and has the right actors, the movie will be a winner.
Ms. Hospital writes about thorny subjects: how far a democratic nation (U. S.) will go or what measures its goverment will take in order to destroy an enemy terrorist cell? Or how much "collateral damage" is too much? But she writes of hopeful themes as well: in spite of the universality of governmental coverups, that the truth will endure. And finally "the dead never stop telling us stories"-- and in a moving scene near the end of the novel as they sit in a cemetery, the character Lou tells another character Samantha that "the dead never leave us."
Ms. Hospital divides her novel into eight books. Each section begins with pertinent quotations from other writers: Shakespeare, Camus, Lewis Carroll, Daniel Defoe et al. With the exception of an ending that I found a tad contrived and really not necessary, this novel is as good as a psychological thriller gets.
Rating:
Summary: Notwithstanding, it's a five star read
Review: This review is for the W. W. Norton & Company hardcover first edition published in July 2003, 401 pages. This edition does not have a reader's guide. DUE PREPARATIONS FOR THE PLAGUE is Janette Turner Hospital's tenth novel. She also has published five collections of stories.
This is a literary spy thriller about the hijacking of Air France flight 64 bound for New York from Paris in September 1987. The narrative present, however, begins in September 2000 and focuses on two persons whose parent or parents died during the tragedy. The story has suspense, intrigue, CIA agents, spies, code names, Arab terrorists, and technological revelation consistent with the thriller genre. But unlike most thriller novels, it does not have a larger than life superhero/heroine, it does not require leaps of faith, and the plot does not terminate in the ridiculous or sublime. This well written novel is both character and plot driven.
For the first time in about fifty reviews that I've submitted, I just read the other customer reviews before finishing mine. Interesting. It appears that those who have tired of the thriller genre, which is gravitating towards formulaic ridiculousness before blissful ending, rate this puppy four or five stars, whereas fans of the genre, nauseated by literary aspects, upchuck two or three. And there is one reader who finds the melding of genre and literary a blasphemous sacrilege, as ignominious as interracial marriage.
I've two observations for the undecided.
Many with an MFA in writing soak their stories in sensory detail, use pages to describe their settings with perfumed words, interrupt dialogue with a symphony of gestures. Janette Turner Hospital is not one of those. Her writing snaps, crackles and pops; it is explicit and purposeful. She tells a story.
On the other hand, Ms. Hospital loaded this one with classical references. The quotations preceding sections are not a bother; read them or skip them. It's the stuff within the story, the analogies and metaphors drawn from the multitude of literature that I've not read that embarrassed me. So I looked them up. Daedalus and Icarus, Scipio and Polybius are from Greek mythology, as is Odysseus and the sorceress Circe. "Bloweth where it listeth" is from the bible (Jon iii 8). Yorick's skull is from Hamlet. Iseult, who fell in love with Tristan, is medieval legend, but Baal Shem Tov, the legendary rabbi, lived from 1698 to 1760. Oh, the Lorenz discovery refers to Edward Lorenz's Chaos Theory about the weather. The four horsemen of death ride in from Apocalypse. Shiva is an Indian god. Kalidasa wrote Cloud Messenger, an Indian love poem. Decameron is the first work of Tuscan literature, which Boccaccio wrote during the plague about the plague.
Notwithstanding, it's a five star read.
Rating:
Summary: ¿This is the Black Death, avenging many centuries of wrong."
Review: With these words the random killing begins in the hijacking of an Air France flight to New York in September, 1987, a five-day ordeal which results in hostage taking, the release of poison gas, and, ultimately, explosions and death for more than 400 people. This fictional but very realistic depiction of the hijacking and the questions it raises about responsibility combine with Turner Hospital's atmospheric and richly detailed imagery to produce a novel that is powerful in its impact and almost surreal in its intensity. In a style somewhat reminiscent of John LeCarre, Turner Hospital tells sinister, overlapping stories about the victims on the flight, the children who were released by the hijackers and survived to adulthood, and the family members who were left behind to mourn and search for answers. The narrative shifts back and forth through different speakers and points of view, from 1987 to the present and back, building a multi-layered and suspenseful story that is haunting in its emotional effect. Though the plot is exciting, the focus here is as much on the characters' psychology as on dramatic action. The now-adult children of the hijacking victims tell their stories in the present as they recall events from the past and the questions which torment them still, while the actual participants in the 1987 hijacking tell their stories up to the moment of their deaths. As the survivors investigate the hijacking, they learn that it is not only possible but likely that members of US security agencies helped engineer and implement the catastrophe which claimed their parents. They believe a man called Sirocco commanded the hijacking, but they are also seeking Salamander, his American "controller." Turner Hospital's eye for detail is unerring, and she uses metaphors with skillful effect to reveal a character's state of mind or create atmosphere. One child/survivor when dreaming, experiences "a terrible intrusive slash of sound, white at the center with red capillaries rivering out." Another character "moves in a weather of anxiety." The author broadens her historical perspective by showing that this kind of violence also existed in Sodom, Gomorrah, and more recently, Nagasaki From literature she cites Boccaccio, Defoe, Camus, and others, pointing out that these writers were condemned "to tell the stories of those who haunted them as an act of propitiation." Smoothly integrated and thought-provoking, these references add to the novel's impact and widen its scope. Though the author relies somewhat heavily on coincidence to resolve the story and create an ending that echoes with "happily ever after," the novel is thoughtful, vividly written, and hypnotic in its spell. 4.5 stars. Mary Whipple
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