This Book Review originally appeared in The Post & Courier, April 9, 2006

AN IMPERFECT LENS. By Anne Roiphe. Shaye Areheart Books. 296 pages. $25.

Cholera does not make for a pretty death.

In the 1880s, in the Egyptian port of Alexandria, it was the stuff of nightmare, of a watery loose madness lurking through the city, felling infant, adult, native and traveler, all alike. Even scientists succumbed, the curved motile rod finding a way inside of their bowels just the same as it found a way inside the bowels of dockworkers and servant girls.

With “An Imperfect Lens,” Anne Roiphe has written an historical novel that traces the path of a team of researchers dispatched from France by Louis Pasteur to uncover the causative agent of cholera. With German microbiologist Robert Koch in Alexandria at the same time as the French team, however, the race to find the source of the disease soon takes up the flag of nationalism; bringing the honor of exclusive discovery home to one’s own country surmounts cooperation. The competitive nature of science, with its inherent jealousies and insecurities, anxieties, simmers just between the lines of the story.

Roiphe employs Pasteur’s young assistant, Louis Thuillier, as the tragic focus of her story. In her narrative, he is the passionate young man with the most to prove, as well as the one who falls in love with the daughter of a prominent Jewish physician. It is a tricky business, weaving imagined thoughts and spoken words into someone’s true life story, fictionalizing the actions of a bit player discovered in footnotes as well as letters written to and by a more famous historical scientist. She seems to carry it off respectfully. Anyone who could say for certain how close to the actual Thuillier she came is long dead anyway.

Ever present in the narrative is the sense of heat, of grime, of bustling markets and rotting fruit, fecal matter mixed in water, contamination. Superstition and ritual acts to cleanse the city of cholera, knife-wielding sea captains defying inspectors, imperialism and conflict between religion and science all play into the story. Bits of the historical record, sudden sketches of other times and places in which cholera swept through populations like a scythe, are peppered throughout the book.

Our own best efforts to understand are all that may, in the end, shelter us from an impartial world of dangers invisible to the naked eye, “An Imperfect Lens” suggests. An appreciation of the superstitious dread cholera was met with even at the end of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the age of medical science lingers long after the final pages.

Reviewer Jason A. Zwiker, a writer based in Charleston, studied communicable and tropical disease at the University of South Florida’s College of Public Health.

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