Secrets of VIRAL (spoilers ahead)

The Secrets of VIRAL (Spoilers)

If you haven’t read VIRAL yet, I strongly suggest that you stop reading right here. I don’t want to spoil a perfectly good book for anyone.

VIRAL has been out for over a year now and perhaps it’s time for a just a little explanation of the book. The section of VIRAL that has garnered the most comments is the epilogue. I’ve heard everything from people having no idea about what it meant to those who completely understood. Some readers even skipped the section thinking it couldn’t be important.

Here’s my take on what it means.

The epilogue takes place in the distant future. The narrator of this section is a blind woman who tells stories to the children of her clan.

The society at this time has lost most of the technology and language that we presently have. The unpunctuated, single sentence structure of this section is an indication of how much literacy has been lost.

The narrator tells a history that is a garbled retelling of the events of the book. The fact that she gets so much wrong is a hint that this takes place a very long time in the future.

She talks about Jon and Jon - these of course are John and Joan. Her comment that they are the mother and father of the whole society suggests that John and Joan were the only people on the island to survive. John likely transmitted the disease to the people of Newfoundland and he and his sister survived because they had unusual immune systems.

Throughout the book there are suggestions that the survival of mankind is of utmost importance. To ensure this survival, John and Joan procreated. Because the whole society comes from this brother and sister there are all kinds of genetic difficulties. The narrator talks about how many sick children there are and how difficult it is for people to reproduce.

There are many parts of the story that the narrator gets wrong. She assumes that the vessel St. John’s and the city of St. John’s were named after John and Joan. The idea here is that myths of every society eventually are full of mistakes after many years of retelling.

The book ends with a little hope when the narrator says that the children she is teaching see boats entering what is left of the St. John’s harbour. Someone else had survived the pandemic but we can’t be certain if they came from mainland Canada or somewhere else in the world.

There is one more level to the epilogue that may be of interest. The narrator of this section is a blind storyteller. The most famous blind poet from history is Homer who reputedly is the source of stories like the Odyssey. These Greeks stories are very old and come from a time before anything was written down. The narrator in VIRAL is from a similarly preliterate time and tells a story much like the Odyssey.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus leaves the island of Calypso to return to his wife at home. Along the way he interacts with the cyclops, the sirens and has all kinds of other adventures. When he finally returns home, his wife doesn’t recognize him.

In VIRAL, John lives in an apartment building called the Calypso and throughout the book is trying to return home. Along the way he meets a one-eyed sheep farmer (the cyclops) and a singing waitress (a siren) who lures him to her bedroom. When he finally returns home his sister doesn’t recognize him.

So VIRAL is on one level a retelling of the Odyssey. If you want to dig just a little deeper, you might notice that the unpunctuated ending of VIRAL has a famous predecessor. James Joyce’s Ulysses ends with sixty pages of unpunctuated stream of consciousness (and you thought the two pages in VIRAL was excessive). Ulysses was also a retelling of the Odyssey.

Those are just some of my thoughts around what VIRAL is about. But once a book is written, it belongs to the reader. You might see other meanings in the book and I would be delighted to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading.