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Life.Culture.Discovery.

How quarantine killed Romeo and Juliet: Covid-19 shines new light on old stories

  • Having avoided any novel supposed to shape his experience of the pandemic, one reader realised his experience was shaping the novels he was reading
  • Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox sparked the revelation – a fable of man’s inhumanity to the natural world recast as an oddly euphoric allegory of Covid-19

Reading Time:5 minutes
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Hong Kong Ballet perform Romeo and Juliet. Were it not for a messenger’s stint in quarantine, Shakespeare’s play could have ended a lot more happily. Photo: Keith Hiro (HKG)

“And you know what this means?” said Mr Fox. “It means none of us need ever go out into the open again!” Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Roald Dahl

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Of the countless questions that have been raised by the Covid-19 pandemic over the past two years, what to read must rank as one of the more trivial. Until, that is, you find yourself looking around for the perfect book to get you through a day in lockdown.

What do human beings read (or watch or listen to for that matter) while people across the world, including friends and family, are falling seriously ill and dying? What do we read when there are days it takes courage to open the front door? Can any book help ease the dread, tiredness and boredom of an extended quarantine? What story could help us understand a world that one week feels changed beyond recognition, and the next seems utterly unaffected or indifferent?

And finally, what book would you choose when the thought that it might just be the last you read is no longer an idle fantasy?

Literary reviews reacted in much the way that music, movie, television and games pages did, by offering endless recommendations of works tailored for a pandemic. Minor or neglected books became overnight bestsellers thanks to plots that more or less directly revolved around plagues: Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century The Decameron, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), and Dean Koontz’s overhyped The Eyes of Darkness (1981), which was touted as having predicted the current pandemic.

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