Rabies / Besnilo

A little while back I stumbled upon some reddit thread talking about some of the best novels in the past ~50 years in the Balkans, a lot of people named this book. Like, A Lot. While I'm not a huge fan of sprawling long thrillers with a million characters, I was excited to give this one a try.

The plot summary is as follows - during the early 80's a new more powerful strain of rabies breaks out at the Heathrow airport. We follow what happens with the people inside the airport as the disease rapidly spreads. All the while there's a slight magical realism element to it - but it's more there to serve as some kind of a symbol rather than a deus ex machina when the plot asks for it.

The work clearly prides itself on being as factually correct as possible, especially with the more microbiology side of things. The author loves giving us massive encyclopedic info dumps, whether it be about England's history with being unable to replace Heathrow, about the Cold War, about viruses, about microbiology, about whatever. I think if you cut out all of the info dumping out of the novel or just incorporated it more naturally and succinctly it would be significantly shorter lmao.

And this is where my issues start.. Here's the thing - Borislav Pekić is a pretty renown author. At the point of this book being out, he had been living in London for 15 years (this will be important later). When this book was announced, people were shocked about his descent into "genre literature" with the connotation of it being too low brow compared to his usual works. Apparently this book strays away from his usual writing style - to the dismay of some and delight of other readers. For the general public, this book was a major success. I'll give him a couple of things. The book is written in such a way that everything crescendos to the climax in a satisfactory way. The main portions of the book are divided into sections named after rabies progression stages and the plot also moves in the same way. Structurally, the book is great. But there were a few crucial problems I had with it which made reading the book a slog at multiple points.

First of all - the writers voice, the narration, the language, the way ideas are being expressed. As mentioned earlier, there's a lot of infodumping, which at times comes across as fart huffing. The language is one of my biggest issues and I'm surprised nobody brings it up. I don't know whether it's because Pekić has been living in England for so long, but this book reads as if it was originally written in British English and then translated badly into Serbian, without taking localization into account at all. Maybe that was his intent - to make the swearwords sound "british" to us yugos, but frankly it's so grating. The use of swearwords was my biggest issue. Bastard, piece of shit, bloody etc. None of these terms are used in our very colorful balkan swear dictionary. And yet I had to be exposed to their grotesque literal translations. I did not enjoy it. If I see one more kopile... The syntax in the book is also very unnatural at times, it seriously seems as if things were literally translated from english. It reminds me of how balkan diaspora speaks when they come back home from Germany or Austria and they pretend to have forgotten their mother tongue because they are so civilized now, and it irks me lmao. Yes I sometimes forget words from speaking english so much, but I don't change my syntax, nor do I literally translate swear words - something I consider blasphemy when our own swearwords are so amazing and colorful. My rant aside, maybe these language choices were done to make the setting feel more british, but I feel like it was a total miss for me. Next is my issue with the narration. It's a bit pretentious. Not in a fun way either... It becomes more annoying when the author is trying to hammer the same point for the 50th time. Yes, yes, maybe the real rabid people were le normal people all along. I can't tell you how many times that idea was expressed through the narrator in the novel but it's definitely more than I could count on one hand.

My next issue is with the scope and the scale. I feel like the intent was to truly make this a global event, hence it's happening at Heathrow, one of the worlds busiest and most condensed airports. The origin of the rabies comes from Megiddo, the place where the end of the world happens (snort do you get it snort). Russians are involved. Americans are involved. World War 2 is somehow involved. It's kind of like an action movie in that sense, and I guess judging by the time period it was written in, it fits perfectly. But I feel like you could shave off this unnecessary lard and make it so much more contained and interesting. At times, there was too much rambling about politics. Honestly, I didn't care about the telephone convos between the president of the USA and USSR. I didn't care about the Holocaust plot, it was all... redundant, unnecessary. The message of the novel would have stood our more had the airport been the main universe and we weren't taken out of it.

In regards to the sheer amount of characters, I didn't like it at first but it grew on me over time. On my reader this book had 1200 pages, up until about page 500 we were still having new characters introduced. And then slowly they all get killed off one by one. You don't care about any of them. I think they all just existed to be killed off in various ways.

Since I really love microbiology and was always fascinated by horrible illnesses you can't turn back from like rabies and prion diseases I was really hyped about this book - but it ended up kind of disappointing me. It's both shallow and too broad at the same time. Although I do think this book would be a fun movie or series, I even read a review stating the same. I can see it as an action packed mini series, not completely my thing though lmao.