In the Company of Men by Veronique Tadjo

At night, I have nightmares. I dream I'm still among the sick. The tent's a furnace. In the middle of the day, the sun's beating down on the canvas. I gasp for breath, my head buzzes, I don't have any protective suit on--I'm naked, in fact, and the virus has infected me. My gums are bleeding, my soul leaving my body. I can feel it slipping away through my navel... I wake up with a start.

Ivorian author Veronique Tadjo's In the Company of Men details the 2015-2016 Ebola epidemic of West Africa through numerous eyes. The novel is structured as a series of monologues by implicated figures, some you might expect, others that might surprise. It begins with a doctor, struggling to make it through a day in the highly contagious atmosphere of a tent hospital, a nurse, a young girl who survives the disease, making her immune and a perfect volunteer, a man separated for the last time from his fiancee. But Tadjo also gives a monologue to none other than the disease itself, who of course pleads innocence--it's man who's to blame, really, selfish and greedy and having isolated himself from the natural world that produces both the disease and healing. The voice of Ebola is balanced out by that of the bat who enabled transmission from the animal world to the human one, and who speaks on humanity's behalf. These arguments are adjudicated by the Baobab, the great tree who anchors the novel, watching the progress of human life.

As Tadjo illuminates, a disease like Ebola needs more than just virulence to spread. There's human cruelty and paranoia, as with those who exile their own families, refusing to look out for them even after the disease is cured, or the countries that harden their borders and even turn to armed conflict. But it's a story of human resilience as well, of people who come together at great risk to themselves in order to keep others alive. In its final judgment, the Baobab tells us that it agrees with the bat, not the disease: "in its desire to absolve itself," Ebola "considers only Man's faults." This approach, which transforms the disease, the bat, and the tree into characters from a kind of medieval passion play or Greek philosophical treatise, works--but the novel suffers, I thought, when it turns the same methods to human beings. There's too much pressure to make the doctor all doctors, the nurse all nurses, the suffering patient all patients. They end up seeming more like avatars than real people.