THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 9, 1996 TAG: 9610090029
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROSS C. REEVES
LENGTH: 56 lines
``THE THIRD Pandemic'' joins the growing list of apocalyptic books featuring deadly germs. Adopting a style best described as ``James Michener meets ``The Hot Zone,' '' Pierre Ouellette provides technical treatises on everything from microbiology to aeronautical engineering, including the overly anthropomorphisized saga of a plucky tribe of bacteria as it mutates and travels the world. Evolving finally into drug-resistant and wildly contagious superbugs, the bacteria touch off a pandemic destined to halve the world's population.
These technical accounts serve as a menacing backdrop to a host of story lines. Oullette begins with a super-secret multinational corporation that exists only in cyberspace. The computer gurus at this modern-day SPECTRE not only design a deadly mutation but also predict its evolution within a decade. Defying the notion that big corporations are hopelessly shortsighted, top management decides to keep the discovery secret while it plows vast resources into development of a cure. They figure to make a killing, as it were, if and when the hypothetical bug achieves its statistical destiny and actually evolves into existence.
When one of the designers gets wind of this scheme she flees with the data disks to Seattle, the bad guys in hot pursuit. There she comes under the protection of a detective who happens to be on the trail of a serial poisoner who put his wife in a coma. The only one who believes him is a public health worker he met while negotiating with a local gangster to end a prison uprising provoked by a tuberculosis outbreak. Amazingly, the public health worker is the fleeing heroine's friend from cyberspace. Even more amazing, the selfsame gangster is hired by her ex-employer to kill her and retrieve the disks. He instead elects to chase them (and her) down to further his own political aspirations to lead the post-plague world.
On the other side of the globe, yet another plot develops off the coast of Africa, where a sneezing parrot from Gabon kicks off the pandemic by infecting local islanders with the very bacterium hypothesized by the computer. Aided by the poisoner, the plague finally hits Seattle, where the detective's ``troubled'' nephew becomes active in a gang right out of ``A Clockwork Orange.''
Ouellette attempts to stitch together this overabundance of plots with the lamest of literary devices - coincidence. The mathematical probability of the bacteria evolving begins to look like a lead pipe cinch when compared to the character's chance encounters. It even falls to the bratty nephew to be in the boat that startles the geese that cause a jet crash that destroys the disks being sent to the scientist who is online to the doctor on the island where the sneezing parrot . . . well, you get the idea.
It must be said that Ouellette turns his phrases well and presents vivid (albeit overworked) characters. Those with a taste for technical detail, a penchant for apocalyptic visions and a tolerance for absurd coincidences may well enjoy following ``The Third Pandemic'' to the end. MEMO: Ross C. Reeves is an attorney with Willcox & Savage, P.C., in
Norfolk. by CNB