The White Plague probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Certainly the novel has one of the more interesting and dramatic premises out there: The wife and small children of biologist extraordinaire John Roe O’Neill become collateral damage in a bombing orchestrated by the Irish Republican Army, so O’Neill, quite mad with grief and anger, draws on his extensive personal and professional resources to concoct a disease that only, and always, kills females. (He has nothing specific against women; he just wants the entire world to feel the pain he feels.) He initially unleashes the superbug in Ireland (because they tolerate the IRA), England (because they wouldn’t play nicely with Ireland, thus necessitating the IRA’s existence), and Libya (because that’s where the IRA guys were trained). But as we all know, pathogens don’t respect national boundaries, and soon the world is coping with a horrific pandemic. The only person who can cure the White Plague -- and save the world -- may be O’Neill himself... except he probably won’t, because by now he is (to employ the clinical term) batshit crazy.

Doesn’t that sound interesting?

Unfortunately, after setting up a tidy little medical potboiler -- the kind that entertains you as you lounge on the beach by day, then seeps into your dreams and awakens you in a sweaty, heart-pounding panic by night -- author Frank Herbert decided to take things in a different direction. The scarily plausible bio-techno-thriller morphs into a novel of ideas about What It Means To Be Irish, and the result is a crashing -- and, sadly, extremely boring -- disappointment.

Part of the problem lies in where Herbert chooses to take the plot. Intending to sabotage efforts to find a cure, O’Neill travels (under a series of assumed identities) to Ireland, where he is sussed out almost immediately. But rather than take him into custody, the IRA (which has more or less taken things over there) allows him to make his way on foot to the research laboratories at Killaloe, accompanied by three carefully chosen companions: a mute boy who lost his mother to the White Plague (to tug at O’Neill’s heartstrings), the world’s most annoying priest (in case O’Neill wants to confess), and an IRA operative named Joseph Herity who is -- oh yes -- the very man that pulled the switch that tripped the bomb that killed O’Neill’s family. Herity is a real piece of work, given to mocking, insulting, deriding, and otherwise being unpleasant to everyone who crosses his path. He loathes the Catholic Church and the English in equal measure, and never misses an opportunity to say so, at length and as obnoxiously as he possibly can. I honestly can’t remember despising a character more -- not because he hates the Church/the English/pretty much everything else (I mean, whatever) but because he just won’t. shut. up about it. And that’s saying something, given that I survived the Author’s Cut of Dark Prince.

Obnoxious as Herity is, however (and he is obnoxious), he somehow refrains from ever telling O’Neill “Sure and ‘tis I’m the one as sent yer Mary and the sweet wee wains to th’ angels.” (That’s another thing -- the Irish characters mostly speak in a magically delicious brogue. It’s very… ethnically colorful.) Instead, he rants, at length, about Ireland’s history, enemies, myths, legends, etc. etc. etc. The priest chides him for being a blaspheming little shit, which, to be fair, he is, and frets about everyone’s immortal soul. Continuing to be fair, however, I should note that when we do see the scientists of Killaloe, they’ll start out talking about recombinant DNA and then all of a sudden they’re talking about the Literature of Despair, which was invented in Ireland. And I’m like, this is very interesting, but I took the same Intro to Irish Writers class that all the other literature majors did back in college and WHAT ABOUT THE PLAGUE, DUMBASSES?

As for the scientists, when they’re not busy trading interpretations of Yeats and Joyce, they race to contain the plague, but no one trusts anyone else (nor, as it turns out, should they). I had trouble keeping all these well-educated white guys straight -- say what you will about Herity, but at least he stands out from the crowd -- but the “scientific” sections are among the more interesting in the book, if a bit dated. (Okay, maybe more than a bit. The scientists bicker ad nauseam over who gets “computer time,” for instance.) There’s also a subplot involving a medical student and his whiny pregnant girlfriend, but they’re both eminently forgettable.

And so the book grinds on. The whiny girlfriend whines. Herity rants and mocks. O’Neill is crazy and getting crazier. The priest wrings his hands a lot. Rant, rant, rant. Whine, whine, whine. Wring, wring, wring. Eventually, your intrepid reviewer begins to skip every page on which the word “Herity” appears. Things go a lot faster after that, and the book ends on a sort-of-kind-of upbeat note, in which we see that the few women who survived the plague are being encouraged to take “second husbands” and bear daughters to replace the females who have been lost. The women in the book -- even the whiny girlfriend, who is now a whiny wife -- are happy and excited about this, not seeming to understand that “You can bear the children of many men!” is really not that far removed from “You must bear the children of many men.” No one seems to be concerned about the prospect of returning women to lives of reproductive slavery -- not even the women. Hmm.

What’s really, really frustrating about The White Plague is that lurking around the edges is a very, very interesting book. There’s a lot Herbert could say, but doesn’t, about the link between madness and creativity (there’s nothing to suggest that O’Neill could have conceived anything so immense while sane). There are a lot of throwaway bits, each a novel, or at least an award-winning short story , in itself: the people of Israel are moved en masse to Brazil, whereupon they immediately declare themselves a separate and independent state; pockets of Irishmen reject Catholicism and return to the ancient Druidic religions, complete with fertility rituals beneath the rowan tree; the Pope offers general absolution over the radio, knowing that Rome is about to be nuked in an attempt to contain the plague; and the plague begins to mutate and spread to other species, portending an ecological disaster. And my friends who know a thing or two about genetics tell me that what O’Neill does would be difficult, but is theoretically possible. Chew on that for a while.

But instead, you will learn from this book that the Irish are a) sad b) Catholic c) drinkers who d) eloquently produce the Literature of Despair. Frank Herbert wrote many interesting, thought-provoking, ground-breaking novels. The White Plague is not one of them. You can safely give this one a miss.

   -- Kate Nagy