Paperback of the week: Migraine by Samuel Fisher

In her 1926 essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf asks where the novels are “devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache”. With a few exceptions – De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; parts of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time – “literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent”.

It’s fair to say the situation has changed. Indeed, it changed just a year after Woolf’s essay was published with the arrival of the English translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, perhaps the greatest exploration of the diseased body in literature. More recent novels in which illness is fundamental include Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This.

Migraine, the third novel by Samuel Fisher, differs from these portrayals of the unwell within society by imagining a society entirely defined by chronic illness – one in which the body’s “sheet of plain glass”, as Woolf described it, is cracked, stained and clouded by blasts of staggering, debilitating pain.

Fisher’s previous book, Wivenhoe, gave us a Britain blanketed by months of snowfall. Migraine, which takes place in the same world but follows different characters and requires no knowledge of its predecessor, reveals that the snow fell for five years before “the Thaw”. Since then, the climate has become unstable in other ways, most obviously manifesting in frequent violent storms. It’s these that trigger the migraines from which practically every member of this battered society now suffers.

The novel begins with Ellis experiencing his first migraine: a “total hijack”; pain that makes people “forget the trick of being themselves”. Given shelter by a former bookshop owner called Sam (a self-portrait: Fisher co-owns a bookshop in Hackney), Ellis recuperates before embarking on a day-long trek to Vauxhall via Shoreditch, St Paul’s and Southwark, in search of Luna, his ex-lover. “Sounds like a quest,” Sam remarks, announcing his intention to tag along.

As with any quest, peril awaits, although more action occurs in flashback than during the trek southward. And these flashbacks gives us the world of the novel in glimpses: Ellis’s job at a vertical farm in Dalston; the period of lawless scavenging that followed the Thaw; the return, via meltwater, of various waterborne diseases (dysentery, cholera, polio); and the emergence of a semi-functioning anarchist society based on the bartering of goods and skills.

We also learn that many inhabitants of this world carry a small subdermal chip in their neck. Originally intended to rehabilitate stroke victims, these “Neurals” offer “retinal projection and haptic feedback”. They also allow you to join a network of nervous systems and live vicariously through others: social media but turbocharged. Before Ellis ever had a migraine of his own, he experienced Luna’s. She became famous for the quality and invention of her “aurashows”.

The idea that someone’s pain could be made actual – or digitally approximated – and therefore shared, is a profound one. Woolf would have approved. And the journey Migraine takes us on is primarily one of ideas: how we live with illness; how we live with one another. Opinions will differ about whether Luna’s argument – that a new way of living has been made possible by everyone’s shared illness – is convincing. But there is undoubtedly something powerful in the book’s vision of a broken society in which potential fixes, be they religious, political, organisational or philosophical, are cycled through in a desperate search to find something, anything, that works.

Will a new, better world be born or will this reset only offer another chance to make the same mistakes as before? The answer to that lies, tantalisingly, beyond this novel’s territory.

Migraine by Samuel Fisher is published by Corsair (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £9.89 (10% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Toby Shepheard/Getty Images