The Winter Station

The outbreak of plague in Manchuria during the winter of 1910–1911 tests a Russian doctor’s physical, emotional, and moral stamina in Shields’s accomplished third novel (after The Fig Eater and The Crimson Portrait). When Chief Medical Examiner Baron Rozher Alexandrovich von Budberg learns that two bodies were whisked away from outside the Kharbin train station, he wonders why he wasn’t notified. The czar’s appointed administrator, Gen. Dmitry Khorvat, assures him the corpses were not Russian and so are of no importance, then asks him to investigate the death of a Russian businessman. The businessman’s daughter describes her father coughing up blood before he died. Evidence mounts of a deadly epidemic made worse by a political cover-up. Matters worsen: a public-relations-minded Chinese epidemiologist breaks with tradition to conduct secret autopsies but refuses to shut down the railway during Chinese New Year; plague-wagons patrol the streets removing people who look sick; a doctor ignoring the baron’s pleas to use masks, gloves, and disinfectant succumbs to contagion, as do countless others. Shields’s Kharbin is plagued not only by disease but also by rumor, superstition, pride, and ignorance. This fictional portrait of a man caught in a real-life medical crisis proves affecting and timely in its exploration of conflicts between cultures and classes, ambition and mortality, science and politics. (Jan.)