Add to that the broadly painted and unsympathetic cast and stuttering pace, and The White Plague is a definite miss. But it’s not so good that it overcomes all the other flaws.īottom line: In keeping the reader from feeling the absence of women, The White Plague fails its intriguing premise. It’s not that Herbert doesn’t write well his vocabulary is very well used and there is some lovely imagery. It’s just not very flattering or compelling. The female characters are also lacking–the only interesting one, a giantess scientist, dies very early, and the lone female representative for the whole novel is a sniffling mess who is supposed to be strong.

Our nominal protagonist, O’Neill, is one of your villains, and we’re not given a hero to oppose him until very late in the novel. But here, it is, combined with how unsympathetic they are. The entire cast is broadly sketched, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a thriller with a large cast. It makes the timeline jumpy and disjointed. One chapter follows O’Neill before he writes several threatening letters, after a few chapters follow characters receiving those letters. Herbert also has a weird habit of not making up for time passed in one plot in other plots. These plots and subplots are so diverse and lacking in female characters that we often go chapters without feeling the loss of women. It’s typical thriller pacing–short chapters that switch between the various plots. Because of this, we rarely feel the absence of women, which I feel should be central to a story like this–their absence contributes to the horror. These wonderful moments are glossed over in a favor of a manly tramp across Ireland and other male dominated arenas. The too few glimpses of the human toll are striking, particularly an old man who doesn’t wash his hand-knit sweater because it was the last thing his deceased wife touched. While this premise is intriguing, the plot tends to ignore the reality of a lack of women in favor of hard science and clunky politics. But O’Neill has no intention of letting them curb his revenge… As world leaders struggle to find a way to deal with the devastating effects, Ireland moves ahead in the search for the cure. Driven mad by their deaths, O’Neill, a brilliant molecular scientist, unleashes a plague upon the world that wipes out most of the women on the face of the Earth.

In The White Plague, John Roe O’Neill’s world is shattered when an IRA bomb kills his wife and children on a visit to Ireland. It’s a fascinating concept, and I thought I would be in good hands with Herbert. When I saw that The White Plague, also by Herbert, dealt with the consequences of a plague that wiped out most women, I was intrigued. The epic scope, the nobility, and especially the Fremen caught my attention just so when I was fifteen.

The white plague by frank herbert