by Rita Donovan.
Tesseract, 1997
155 pages, $8.95 paper ISBN 1-895836-28-X

Reviewed by Miriam Jones

[Originally published in Paragraph: The Canadian Fiction Review 20.1 (Summer 1998): 36.]

Rita Donovan's The Plague Saint might at first seem slightly reminiscent of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, especially to those who have not read much other speculative fiction, as it treats similar issues of reproductive rights under a near-future theocracy, from the perspective of a woman grossly exploited by the new regime. Also, though Donovan's text uses a framework from genre fiction, it exists at the edges of science fiction and a more self-consciously literary genre. But to focus on such resemblances, though they do indicate compelling millennial concerns about human rights and the rise of the religious right, does not do full justice to this lyrical, haunting text.

People in the near future are suffering from an unnamed disease; perhaps it is AIDS or some mutated offshoot, though it seems to have more in common with older, more archetypal plagues. A repressive theocracy has arisen, the Church of the Survivors, and those in power have chosen Lily Dalriada to be their new saint. On the run, she hides with Bernie Difiori, a member of the anti church underground and manufacturer of virtual sex scenarios in this future where physical coupling exists only in the underclass. While with him, Lily gains access to virtual recreations of medieval and Renaissance Florence where she seeks to understand the canonization of an earlier plague saint, Santa Domenica. All this, however, is merely a background for the real movement of the text.

The contrast between the framing genre elements and the intensely realized consciousness of the protagonist create an intriguing conundrum that may have more to do with our preconceptions about science fiction than about any failure of Donovan's. The poetic, even hallucinatory prose admirably evokes the dissonance of Lily's perceptions as she moves back and forth between the present, her own past, and the recreated past. The text is fragmentary, and Lily's thoughts, memories, perceptions and virtual experiences tumble fast upon the reader with kaleidoscopic effect.

Her memories of her daughter, now separated from her, and her sojourns in two Florences, Renaissance and medieval, are more compelling and offer more rich sensory detail than her time in the "real" world. Donovan takes no prisoners with her use of Latin and Italian, but then Lily understands neither language herself, so the reader is immersed, with the character, in the sights, sounds and smells, frequent violence, and obscure rituals in the overlapping plagues of the past. Many parallels between previous apocalyptic times and the present fin-de-millennium are persuasively and subtly drawn.

The Plague Saint—powerful, disturbing and beautiful, for all its brevity— is cutting-edge speculative fiction of a quality that gives lie to those who disdain genre fiction for its alleged formulaic nature and mass-market appeal.