August 2024

The following is an extract from the beginning of Alexander’s brand new stand-alone novel, The Winds from Further West.

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Almost everything starts in a small way. There is no shortage of examples – and attendant metaphors: rivers begin with a trickle of water in a remote upland; oaks emerge from nothing bigger than an acorn; a cloud the size of a hand becomes a full-blown storm. Often it is an apparently insignificant event that ends up dictating the whole shape of our lives: a random, even whimsical, decision; an unanticipated remark; a chance encounter – any of these may have consequences far beyond the immediate.

For Neil, just such a moment occurred when he walked into a Turkish barbershop in Glasgow. He had made an appointment, but he was early, and he had to wait. Had he been on time, his life would probably have been quite different. As it was, he sat down on one of the cracked-leather-covered seats and picked up a copy of New Scientist left by a previous customer among the usual detritus of the barbershop: the men’s grooming monthlies, the well-thumbed copies of car magazines, the out-of-date newspapers. New Scientist was a cut above all that; it reported on scientific advances: new nonstick saucepans, gene editing, insights into the earth’s crust. It also carried advertisements for scientific jobs, and it was one of these that caught his eye. An Edinburgh research institute had a vacancy for a medically qualified researcher. That was what Neil was, and he was coming to the end of his public health contract in Glasgow. He was thirty-five, and ready for a change. The timing could not have been better, and Neil was appointed after an interview that proved surprisingly cursory. He was, in fact, the only candidate, although they kept that from him, out of consideration for his feelings.

Although independent of the major local university, and not part of any other Scottish university, the institute ran courses for undergraduate students, participated in doctoral programmes and undertook research for government bodies. Its staff were experts in both animal and human health; they tracked the progress of diseases at home and abroad, recording their waxing and waning with the seasons and the movement of animals and of people. They responded to the occasional scare, as swine or avian flu wove their way in and out of the newspaper headlines. They watched, at a distance, outbreaks of cholera in distant shanty towns. They waited for what many of them thought to be inevitable: Ebola and Marburg fever were waiting in the wings. It was potentially apocalyptic work.

“Will microbes get us eventually?” a friend asked him.

“That’s what you do, isn’t it? That’s the question that you’re paid to answer.”

Neil smiled. “They’ve been trying hard enough,” he replied.

“And yes, they probably will – sooner or later. But they won’t necessarily get all of us. That happened with the Neanderthals, I think, but we might dodge that bullet.”

His friend was curious, and Neil explained further. “Neanderthals probably died out because they had no resistance to the diseases that Homo sapiens brought when we met them.”

“Rather like the Aztecs?”

“Yes. They had no resistance to Old World viruses. It was an unequal battle. Neanderthals may have had the same experience.”

“So they didn’t die because they couldn’t compete with us – and our clever ways?”

Neanderthals were not stupid, Neil pointed out. They used tools and had fire. They even appeared to engage in artistic activity. Their bad press, which portrayed them as brutes, was almost certainly wide of the mark. Such speculation – historical epidemiology – was, he said, the intellectually challenging part of the subject. For the most part, as he was at pains to point out, his job was much more mundane: gathering statistics, preparing tables, tracking the progress of winter flu as it spread across the globe, following the paths it had always followed – those of humanity on the move. “If only we would stay put for a while,” Neil observed, “we’d run into fewer hostile organisms. But we won’t. Humanity won’t change. Humanity can’t change.”

That was a rare defeatist moment. For the most part, he saw no point in dwelling upon the bleak aspects of his work. He, and people like him, might do little to change the basic rules of engagement between human beings and microbes, but here and there, in small corners of the battlefield, they achieved their largely unsung victories. And in the background, their research, sometimes painfully slow and seemingly entirely theoretical, built up the human armoury against microbial defeat.

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The Winds from Further West is available now from your local bookshop or online.