People just do things sometimes, and despite the amount of perspective switching, I had no idea why they were doing it and no amount of recollection or re-reading could reveal the mystery. Yet, and perhaps Herbert meant this to be clever, there is still much mystery surrounding the motivations of characters. It also seemed to be cheating: rather than allowing the reader to guess a character's thoughts by their words and actions, Herbert just tells us. I found the constant switching between characters' thoughts to be disorienting rather than interesting. The narrator's viewpoint, in third-person, is unsettled and constantly switches between the perspectives of the characters. Unfortunately, this beginning is a stumble rather than a leap. The world's women begin dying and the political and scientific elite scramble to find a cure. O'Neill's marbles go astray, he goes into hiding and manufactures a new plague which he releases into Ireland, England and Libya to scour those sinful countries clean. The action begins as the family of biochemist John Roe O'Neill is killed by an IRA bomb while on vacation. As I removed to irritating book jacket and settled into bed to read, I was hyped. Also, being a traditional Irish musician, the setting in Ireland was a plus. It was his first non-Dune writing that I had found. It was with exitement that I found an old hardcover edition of The White Plague in an unlikely small-town bookstore in Perdue, Saskatchewan.
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