Kall feber

Karin Ryd is a brilliant hematologist. At just a few years over thirty, she’s already renowned enough to get a coveted position to work with the best in her field in the research city way up in the northern mountains. This is a huge joint venture between government and private research giants, an isolated place but fully equipped for the residents’ professional and personal life. Many spend a lifetime here.

Karin’s enthusiasm wanes quickly though. The hierarchy of the city doesn’t sit well with her, she feels she doesn’t get the prerequisits her research calls for, and pretty soon her professional jealousy and frustration is making her step over boundaries. Which in turn reveals strange and scary things going on behind the show more walls of the huge complex. There are trashed, messy, abandoned labs below ground. A group of children are hiding out in a closet in the freezer ward, planning a desperate prank. And there’s a strange disease spreading, whose only symptom is it lowers your body temperature. A kind of cold fever, which nobody in authority will admit even exists.

The beginning of this dystopian page turner, set in a near future, has all the qualities that make Virdborg’s books so eerie. A sparse, clinical, very cold style, and a sense of something being just...wrong, even from the start. There’s something chilling about Karin’s walks through the endless corridors, about the small talk by the coffee machine and about the detatched, decadent night life in the night club district.

Karin is an interesting main character for Virdborg though. Not the numb, confused, silent person he usually employs, but a person who is both petty, arrogant, vain and jealous. And when she begins to try and get to the bottom of what’s going on, the style of the book also changes. It becomes frantic, emotional, somewhat irrational, even feverish. This glissando of styles is very nicely pulled off, and it’s great to see Virdborg experimenting a little.

As a composition, Kall feber is almost perfect. Virdborg gives as little information as he possibly can, and still juggles a plot, a character development and several side plots. It’s not the total enigma that some of his other works are, but still leaves the reader with more questions than answers. I wish he would have dared to skip the “baddie sharing information” part of the ending, but apart from that, this is one of Virdborg’s best works yet. If you like scary, dystopian, puzzling read that leave you with a slight unease, this is for you. show less