they are also a vector of genetic material, a way of introducing genes from one organism into another or of bearing engineered genes into a specific species. As such, they too are a type of pharmakon, particularly in a world where genetic engineering is beginning to be commonplace, despite how little knowledge we have of its potential long- term effects and consequences. At the same time, viruses also infect our computers; these are not the biological viruses of disease mechanism, but they can function in remarkably similar ways, spreading mis-information and disrupting communication. Both of these uses of the ‘virus’ in contemporary society are reasons why Derrida takes the virus as a particularly significant model of undecideability:
If we follow the intersection between AIDS and the computer virus as we now know it, we have the means to comprehend, not only from a theoretical point of view but also from the sociohistorical point of view, what amounts to a disruption of absolutely everything on the planet, including police agencies, commerce, the army, questions of strategy… It is as if all that I have been suggesting for the past twenty-five years is prescribed by the idea of destinerrance… the supplement, the pharmakon, all the undecidables—it’s the same thing.
The Child Garden is at once an allegory about AIDS—the virus that brought incoherence and death to gay male culture in the West throughout the ’80s and into the ’90s and which remains a massive scourge throughout much of Africa, in particular—and a novel about the potential for “disruption of absolutely everything on the planet” not only through transnational corporatism, unbridled capitalism, and the greed of the ‘haves’ transposed against the tragedies of the ‘have nots,’ but also through attempts to do good. Curing cancer should be a good thing. Government by consensus should be a good thing. Creating a happy, honest populace should be a good thing.
If our good intentions can make so much go wrong, Ryman asks us, what happens when our intentions are not so good? And what can defenses can we muster against well-intentioned mistakes? The answer resides in Milena and her capacity for sheer resistance: her spirit resists incorporation into the singular readings of the Consensus just as her body resists the un-raveling and re-integration of her DNA by the Consensus’s viruses. Because of this, and because of Milena’s extraordinary capacity for love (and Ryman, indeed, suggest that love and resistance to manipulation are one and the same), Milena is able to give the Consensus the gift it desires above all: the cure for the cure for cancer.
And, having said all of that, I have scarcely touched on so many of the wonders that await readers of this brilliant and complex novel. There is so much more that awaits you, dear reader.
Enjoy!
Advances in Medicine
(A Culture of Viruses)
Milena boiled things. She was frightened of disease. She would boil other people’s knives and forks before using them. Other people sometimes found this insulting. The cutlery would be made of solidified resin, and it often melted from the heat, curling into unusable shapes. The prongs of the forks would be splayed like scarecrow’s fingers, stiffened like dried old gloves.
Milena wore gloves whenever she went out, and when she got back, she boiled those too. She never used her fingers to clean her ears or pick her nose. In the smelly, crowded omnibuses, Milena sometimes held her breath until she was giddy. Whenever someone coughed or sneezed, Milena would cover her face. People continually sneezed, summer or winter. They were always ill, with virus.
Belief was a disease. Because of advances in medicine, acceptable patterns of behaviour could be caught or administered.
Viruses made people cheerful and helpful and honest. Their manners were impeccable, their conversation well-informed, their work speedy and accurate. They believed the same things.
Some of the viruses had been derived from herpes and implanted DNA directly into nerve cells. Others were retroviruses and took over the DNA of the brain, importing information and imagery. Candy, they were called, because the nucleic acids of their genes were coated in sugar and phosphates. They were protected against genetic damage, mutation. People said that Candy was perfectly safe.
Milena did not believe them. Candy had nearly killed her. All through her childhood, she had been resistant to the viruses. There was something in her which fought them. Then, at ten years old, she had been given one final massive dose, and was so seared by fever that she had nearly died. She emerged with encyclopaedic knowledge and several useful calculating facilities. What other damage had the viruses done?
Milena tested herself. Once, she tried to steal an apple from a market stall. It was run, as so many things were in those days, by a child. When Milena’s hand touched the apple’s dappled skin, she had thought of what it cost the boy to grow the apples and haul them to market and how he had to do all this in his spare time. She could not do it, she could not make herself steal. Was that because of the virus? Was it part of herself? She could not be sure.
There was one virus to which Milena knew she had been immune. There was one thing at least that she was sure was part of herself. There was no ignoring the yearning in her heart for love, the love of another woman.
This was a semiological product of late period capitalism. So the Party said. Milena suffered, apparently, from Bad Grammar. Bad
She was angry and that frightened her. Anger was dangerous. Anger had killed her father. He had been given so many viruses to cure him of it that he had died of fever. Milena was certain that one day soon, the Party would try to cure her, too, of anger, of being herself. Milena lived in fear.
Everyone was Read at ten years old, by the Party. It was part of their democratic rights. Because of advances in medicine, representative democracy had been replaced by something more direct. People were Read, and models were made of their personalities. These models joined the government, to be consulted. The government was called the Consensus. It was a product of late period socialism. Everyone was a part of the Consensus, except Milena.
Milena had not been Read. She had been too ill with viruses at ten years old to be Read. Her personality was still in flux; a Reading would have been meaningless. She had not been Read, but she had been Placed as an adult. Would they remember, soon? When she was Read, her Bad Grammar and her petty crimes would be discovered. And then, as a matter of social hygiene, she would be made ill, in order to cure her.
Milena was frightened of dying when it happened, like her father. Had he been resistant as well? Her father had died, in Eastern Europe, and her mother had fled with Milena to England, where the diseases were milder. Then she too had died, and Milena had grown up as an orphan in a foreign land.
She had grown up with a head full of theatrical visions. She loved the mechanics of rotating stages, of puppets, of painted flats being raised and lowered. She loved the cumbersome, stinking alcohol lights that blazed with brightness found only in theatre. She thought about such things as the effect of alternating bands of white and yellow light cast over a white, white stage. She loved light. She toyed with hazy ideas of productions that consisted only of light. No people.
At ten years old, Milena had been Placed for work in the theatre, as an actress. This was a mistake. Milena was a terrible actress. There was something unbending in her that refused to mimic other people: she was always herself. She was doomed always to fight to stay herself.
Most mornings, a bus would take Milena to her next performance. She would sit, arms folded, like a flower that had not yet bloomed, and look at London as it creaked past her window.
People called London the Pit, with rueful fondness for its crumbling buildings propped up by scaffoldings of bamboo, for its overcrowding, for its smells. The Pit, they called it, because it lay in a depression, a river valley between hills protected by a Great Barrier of Coral that kept back the rising sea and estuary.
Outside her window, Milena saw women in straw hats smoking pipes and selling dried fish. She saw children dancing to toy drums for cash or pushing trolleys full of dusty green vegetables. Men in shorts bellowed to each other like cheerful bullfrogs, rolling barrels of beer down ramps into basements under the street. Giant white horses
