Fever Dream

Samanta Schweblin

Oneworld, £7.99

Alastair Mabbott

IT’S A short one, clocking up only 150 pages, but Fever Dream is a novel that makes an impact vastly out of proportion to its actual length. It consists of two voices conversing at a hospital bedside. The main narrator is Amanda, paralysed and sightless. Interjections and encouragement come, in italics, from a boy called David, of whom more shortly. Are they communicating telepathically? It doesn’t matter.

Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin creates an unsettling atmosphere from the first page. Amanda has only a few hours to live, hours in which David must steer her recollections of the recent past towards uncovering the precise moment at which her fate was sealed.

Amanda, from Buenos Aires, has rented a holiday home in a rural area for herself and her daughter, Nina. She’s got to know her neighbour, Carla, who tells her a strange, supernatural tale about her son, David. Carla relates that, some years earlier, David had almost died from drinking poisoned water, but a local woman saved him by transmigrating part of David’s soul to another body. The boy survived, but has been a stranger to Carla ever since. For a while after that, he attracted dying animals and buried them. Whether he killed them himself is unclear, but it reinforces the disturbing associations with death and decay that have already been established. Needless to say, this kind of talk makes Amanda very wary of her new friend.

The book’s original Spanish title translates as Rescue Distance, which is probably more appropriate, if less catchy. It’s Amanda’s term for the maximum safe distance she can allow between herself and her daughter at any given time, an elastic figure that the maternal part of her brain instinctively and continually calculates, depending on circumstances.

But in Schweblin’s fatalistic vision, no amount of well-intentioned supervision is enough to save a child from disaster that strikes without warning. Amanda’s rescue distance counts for nothing when she and Nina are infected by some kind of toxic eco-menace which is never explained but which David describes as being “like worms”. David’s insistence on hurrying the dying Amanda past all the unimportant details of the past few days to pinpoint “the exact moment when the worms come into being” adds a ticking clock to an already oppressive mood of suspense and dread, as well as Amanda’s devastation over her failure to protect her daughter from harm.

Shortlisted for this year’s International Man Booker Prize, Fever Dreams presents a new twist on the horror genre, as original as it is unsettling, and benefits from some sophisticated but elegantly employed narrative techniques. It’s tempting to see this dread as having specifically Argentinian origins, given the concern in rural Argentina about increased pesticide use causing birth defects, miscarriages and cancer, but Schweblin elevates the fear of a toxic environment to a primal and existential level via an almost Lynchian sense of disorientation. It’s one of those books that remakes the world, rendering it a creepier place than before.