It's the summer solstice weekend, and 150,000 people descend on a farm in the northeast of England for an open-air music festival. At first, a spot of rain seems to be the only thing dampening the fun - until a mystery bug appears. Before long, the illness is spreading at an electrifying speed and seems resistant to all antibiotics. Can journalist Zoe Meadows track the outbreak to its source, and will a cure be found before the disease becomes a pandemic?
A heart-racing thriller, Resistance imagines a nightmare pandemic that seems only too credible in the wake of COVID-19. Number one bestseller and queen of crime Val McDermid has teamed up with illustrator Kathryn Briggs to create a masterful graphic novel.
The Queen of Crime launches into a new format
In collaboration with illustrator Kathryn Briggs, the Scottish Queen of Crime Val McDermid launches into a new medium with Resistance - the graphic novel.
In this bleak dystopian thriller, we follow journalist Zoe Beck, as she follows the story of a fast-spreading pandemic, from "patient zero", through devastating personal loss, towards a new beginning.
Zoe attends the Summer Solstice music festival in rural Northumberland in her professional guise, hoping to sell several interviews she conducts with musical acts. The festival is beset by constant rain and Zoe shelters in the food van of her friends Sam and Lisa Shore - "Sam's Sausage Sandwiches" - between interviews. Before long, several performers and many patrons begin to feel the effects of a gastro bug, a development festival organisers are keen to play down.
Zoe's relieved to return home to Newcastle and to her partner and their two sons. But before long, a headline performer from the festival is reported as having died from a mystery illness, and many who had been in attendance begin to fall seriously ill, even those who had initially appeared to have recovered from the initial gastro infection.
As the mystery disease spreads throughout the UK and the world, Zoe tries desperately to get to the truth of what is happening. Authorities have zeroed in on Sam's Sausages as the initial source of the pathogen, and her friends are forced into hiding to avoid the community backlash. Zoe identifies suspect practices at the farm which supplied Sam with his supposedly "organic" meat. She also makes contact with research scientist Dr. Aasmah Siddiqui, from whom she begins to learn the awful truth about the elusive and antibiotic-resistant Erysipelas pathogen - colloquially known as "The Sips".
In these current times, Resistance was a disquieting read. Many of the developments are gut-wrenching on a personal scale, and horrifying at a global or species level. McDermid explores many pertinent issues - the politicisation of threats to population health and safety, the impacts of commercial motives undermining ethics and consideration of the greater good in both the pharmaceutical and agriculture-food production industries, and the inability of our under-resourced healthcare systems to deal with a sudden and fast-moving pandemic. She also considers the human and community-level responses that might occur when subjected to threats of this kind.
Kathryn Briggs's comic-style illustrations are fitting to the narrative and evocative of the horror of the situation. I was intrigued by her incorporation of many recognisable motifs, including illuminated manuscript, religious iconography, ancient Greek art and even public service letterheads into her illustrations. The dynamic combination of narrative and illustration made for a compelling read.
Readers around the world will bring to this edition of Resistance their own experience of living during a pandemic, which is not something the author can have anticipated when she wrote the original narrative. In the course of preparing for this review, I listened to Resistance in its original form - a radio play released by Val McDermid in 2017, starring the fabulous Gina McKee in the lead role as Zoe. While there are some changes to character names and genders, and additional dialogue has been added in places, this new graphic novel release closely resembles its predecessor. It's remarkably prescient of McDermid to have accurately fictionalised several issues that have arisen during the current Covid-19 pandemic almost three years in advance.
Resistance isn't an easy read, with many confronting scenes and themes, and may be especially triggering for those who have suffered personal losses due to Covid-19. However, I feel that it's a characteristically well-researched and written piece by one of my favourite writers. I'd recommend it to all lovers of dramatic contemporary fiction, including those who, like myself, haven't yet ventured far into the emerging format of graphic novels.
Sarah, 17/06/2021
