Ship Fever and Other Stories
by Andrea Barrett
Summary
Seven stories and a novella, all of them about science as a human passion, worked variously across two centuries: Linnaeus in old age, his memory dissolving, visited by the ghosts of the apostles he sent to die collecting for him; a young woman in the 1970s watching her husband, a geneticist, appropriate the one great story her family owns, her grandfather's boyhood encounter with Gregor Mendel, until the telling itself becomes a theft; amateur naturalists, thwarted women, secret sharers of other people's discoveries, each story built on the gap between the love of knowledge and the credit for it.
The title novella is the masterpiece, and the reason the book is remembered. In 1847, Grosse Isle, the quarantine station in the St Lawrence below Quebec, receives the famine ships: a hundred thousand Irish emigrants crossing that season in vessels so lethal they were called coffin ships, bringing typhus with them. Lauchlin Grant, a young Quebec doctor going nowhere, takes the station posting half for conscience and half for a married woman's good opinion, and Barrett drops him into a catastrophe rendered with terrible specificity, the holds, the fever sheds, the arithmetic of triage, and one patient, Nora Kynd, a survivor who becomes the novella's second life. It is the great fictional account of the epidemic, medicine as both vocation and helplessness.
Around two hundred and fifty pages in all, in prose of formal, old fashioned clarity.
Best for readers who want fiction that takes science seriously as a way of loving the world, and a title novella that permanently marks its subject.
Historical Context & Significance
Ship Fever won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1996, one of the prize's genuine surprises: a quiet collection of science haunted stories from a writer whose four earlier novels had gone largely unnoticed, published by Norton without fanfare, beating the season's famous names. The award changed her working life, and it changed something larger: her success opened space for the flourishing genre of fiction about scientists.
Barrett's method is a naturalist's: recurring families of characters thread through her later books, Servants of the Map, The Air We Breathe, so that the collected work forms a single genealogy of scientific obsession across two centuries, cousins and descendants of the Ship Fever cast reappearing decades on.
The novella's subject was itself a recovery: Grosse Isle's mass graves hold thousands of the famine Irish, and Barrett's account has become one of the defining imaginative treatments of the 1847 crossing.