Blog tour: Kill Them With Kindness by Will Carver
This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.
‘The threat of nuclear war is no longer scary. This is much worse. It’s invisible. It works quickly. And it’s coming…
‘The scourge has already infected and killed half the population in China and it is heading towards the UK. There is no time to escape.
‘The British government sees no way out other than to distribute “Dignity Pills” to its citizens: one last night with family or loved ones before going to sleep forever… together. Because the contagion will kill you and the horrifying news footage shows that it will be better to go quietly.
‘Dr Haruto Ikeda, a Japanese scientist working at a Chinese research facility, wants to save the world. He has discovered a way to mutate a virus. Instead of making people sick, instead of causing death, it’s going to make them… nice.
‘Instead of attacking the lungs, it will work into the brain and increase the host’s ability to feel and show compassion. It will make people kind.
‘But governments don’t want a population in agreement. They want conflict and outrage and fear. Reasonable people are harder to control.
‘Ikeda’s quest is thoughtful and noble, and it just might work. Maybe humanity can be saved. Maybe it doesn’t have to be the end. But kindness may also be the biggest killer of all…’
Immunologist Dr Haruto Ikeda and his therapist wife, Kimiko – a Japanese couple living in China – are, by all accounts, very nice people. Ikeda’s usual work involves formulating vaccines for newly-discovered viruses, lest they jump to humans someday. His lab therefore houses germs of unusual provenance, so he and his colleagues can figure out how to counter them.
While Ikeda’s mission is to keep people alive and healthy, a secret cabal of world leaders and senior officals – including Britain’s disingenuous, self-absorbed prime minister, Harris Jackson – wants the opposite. They’re planning to leak one of the viruses Ikeda is investigating (blaming him, and China in general, while they’re there), because when there’s a novel, potentially fatal contagion going around, people get scared, and therefore easier to control.
However, Ikeda stumbles across this plan, and decides to pre-empt it by letting loose a virus of his own. The flu-like symptoms are still there, but it’s far less fatal than the scheduled disease, and once sufferers are over the worst, they’re noticeably kinder than they were previously. The cabal thinks their virus must have leaked early, but is disappointed when it doesn’t induce the levels of sickness and death – and therefore malleability – they anticipated.
Other forces are at work, however. Apparently unrelatedly, a video emerges from China showing a toxic yellow cloud moving down a street, gruesomely killing everyone in its path.
When a similar yellow cloud sets course for Europe, the UK government, having no idea how to stop it, supplies everyone with “Dignity Pills”, so they can opt for more peaceful deaths the night before the cloud arrives. And most of them take it up…
Genuinely nice, uncomplicated people who live beyond a scene or two, in a Will Carver book? Don’t worry: as you can surmise from the description, he hasn’t gone soft on us! Kill Them With Kindness has the highest body count of any of his books to date, and the story behind them is so incredibly, deliciously dark, I have to applaud him for going there.
As we’ve come to expect, Carver deploys a ton of imagination, this time to answer the question: ‘what if there was a virus that made people kinder?’, coming up with truly original, wild consequences that aren’t nice in any way, but certainly aren’t lacking in pitch-black humour.
Paired with Carver’s customary jaded musings on the state of humanity and the world, though, the outcome of Ikeda’s tinkering may be extreme, but (worryingly?) it’s not illogical.
The author’s not wrong in his observations that people like to say ‘be kind’ or think of themselves as nice without actually doing anything, that kindness is sometimes met with suspicion and/or cynicism, and that stories of people being good to one another don’t sell newspapers. Furthermore, people vary in their opinions of what the “kind” thing to do is in any given situation, and “nice” and “right” aren’t always the same thing (cf. Granny Weatherwax).
The recognisability of the pandemic situation also makes the catastrophic climax of the novel feel less fantastical than it might have done in, say, 2016, or if we hadn’t had a pandemic, or if someone with competence and humility had been in charge.
Prime Minister Harris Jackson hides a shrewd and ruthless mindset behind a bumbling, disarming persona; gets away with gaffes and rule-breaking time and again with insincere apologies, distractions, and a total absence of shame; and seizes on the pandemic as a money-making opportunity for his cronies.
At one time, having such a character as prime minister in a book might have prompted an editor/reader to think, ‘this isn’t believable, who would have voted for them?’, or ‘this is too ridiculous, there’s no way their party/the media/the electorate would let them get away with that’. And yet, here we are.
Poor old Ikeda, so idealistic and naïve at the beginning of the story, ends up concluding that humanity was already too far gone by the time he intervened. Still, he doesn’t turn bitter, and considering how bad he feels that anyone at all died from his virus, hopefully never finds out about its role in the mass suicide of virtually an entire nation. And there is a suggestion of a spark of hope for the future among the minuscule number of survivors.
Kill Them With Kindness is an imaginative, dark, and knotty novel about human nature and unforeseen consequences.
