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Janette Turner Hospital revisits Dante in her 2003 novel, Due Preparations for the Plague. I find much in common thematically between this novel and The Last Magician, although reading the latter three or four times in the nineties, I probably inured myself to Hospital as a magus. I was caught up in Due Preparations from the first paragraph, but found myself recognizing all the stylistic tricks, the cadences, the characters (yes, as in John Fowles's novels, the same characters in different avatars surface again and again in Hospital's work); her continued exploration of the themes of power, conspiracy, memory and loss.

Due Preparations is written out of a post-9/11, post-war-on-Iraq consciousness, although based on a fictitious pre-9/11 event: the hijacking of an Air France flight in the fall of 1987 and its tragic outcome. The novel opens thirteen years later with Lowell, son of a hijacked victim, refusing to answer the phone messages of a young woman who claims to have been one of the children freed by the hijackers. (Freed, of course, meaning orphaned. "Collateral damage" is a phrase often repeated in this novel.)

The novel's existential question, posed by one of the hijacked victims, a teacher of philosophy, is: "Who is watching? Who is listening?" He speaks (and I postulate because Hospital is writing post-9/11, and not only post-9/11 but post-Rwanda, post-Bosnia, post-WW2, post-20th-century) for all the "collateral damage" that has been repressed in the collective memory, particularly the west's collective memory. In the novel's concluding chapters, the ten key victims - who as a group form a microcosm of all victims - become voices of courage and redemption in the face of holocaust. They speak first to their children, the next generation, and then to whomever will watch and listen.

There are layers within layers of filmic reality in DP, as there are in The Last Magician and to a lesser extent in Charades and Oyster. We find Watchers watched by Watchers: the Scipio figure viewing the destruction of Carthage is watched by the truth-seekers Lowell and Samantha, who are themselves watched by the reader. ("You are the Watcher" - the narrator tells us. You, too, "have the certainty that you are being watched.") As in the Divine Comedy, the reader observes the observers.

In The Last Magician there are no blazing infernos, although the descent into hell is powerfully and eerily constructed. DP, on the other hand, is riddled with images of burning planes, burning eyes, burning flesh, not to mention the Towering Inferno in Manhattan towards which the novel implicitly moves. A bunker sealed with poisonous gas in the Iraqui desert is not far off from the wide plain of burning tombs in Dante's sixth circle. The instigators of Operation Black Death can be likened to the souls of those who have committed violence - assassins, tyrants, war-mongers - banished to the Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood. Further retribution is exacted in the seventh ring, where the Watcher stumbles onto a scorching expanse of sand and finds "those who have committed violence against God and nature" showered with eternal fire. The murder of the ten victims is reminiscent of the ten levels of the Malebolge, each more evil than the last. And in the ninth and last circle of hell, the "Arch Traitor," Satan, is immersed to his breastbone in a frozen marsh with all who have been traitorous to God, country and family - a recurrent theme in DP.

Still, as the novel progresses, one has a sense of moving upwards out of the darkness, into light. The downward journey through the nine rings of hell becomes the way into Purgatory and Paradise. And while there are numerous victims in this story, there are also survivors. Hospital gathers them together in Manhattan, late in the summer of 2001. This is the point to which the entire novel has been moving, gathering speed - and yet the author knows better than to take us past the brink. "The trees are in full leaf; flower vendors bloom gloriously on every corner ..." Nonetheless, "Manhattan feels dangerous."

With each successive work¹, I have a feeling that I need to go back to Hospital's entire canon. She is deeply interested in the blurred distinction between reality and illusion; at the centre of each of her novels, and also on the peripheries, stands a magus who works for good or evil (Sirocco, Charlie, Oyster, Nicholas). She is keenly aware of time lost and time regained, and of the power and elusiveness of memory. The latter places her in an emotional (maybe I should say aesthetic, but the connotation isn't quite right) tradition or context, whose literary masters are Proust, Alain-Fournier, and John Fowles, among others. Given her long connection to Canada, the current unavailability in this country of many of her works - including Oyster and Charades - is regrettable.

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¹ North of Nowhere, South of Loss, Hospital's 2004 collection of stories published by W.W. Norton, being the most recent example.