Host
My previous review of Robin Cook's Blindsight would have told you that the downsides of the book negated any good things about it. Overcoming my initial hesitancy, I decided to try another—Host, a story about two medical students uncovering a major pharma scam.
Lynn Pierce and Michael Pender are fourth-year medical students at a university in North Carolina. Despite the well-known daily grind med students go through, they do well and have ordinary lives until things go south quickly. When Lynn's boyfriend goes into a coma after rather a routine surgery, both search for a solution relentlessly and accidentally stumble upon a secret that could endanger the hospital's reputation and even cost them their lives.
As you might have gathered from the short synopsis, the story was so spine-chilling that this book belonged to the horror genre than medical fiction. In the storyline that ran parallel to Lynn's and Michael's life, there were intensely graphic depictions of murder, assault and extortion. After all that carnage, the second half dealt with how the two protagonists turn whistleblowers when they find that a pharmaceutical company ran high-risk trials with a healthcare firm as their partner-in-crime. This blood-curdling combination kept me on the edge of my seat, hoping fervently for a reprieve that kept eluding me.
As hair-raising as that was, I prefer this book to Blindsight. However, some glaring faults considerably dampened my experience. One of them was the annoying trope of Russian-American animosity. While we know that the US does not see eye-to-eye with Russia, I'm tired of this repetitive notion of Russian bad guys vs all-American heroes. What was the need to bring nationality into this? Does Cook want to insinuate that only people of certain nations commit crimes? This tendency of some books or movies to demonise countries and propagate a stereotyped depiction of their citizens is offensive.
The constant reminders of Michael's race riled me to no end. From my reading, I gathered that the book is not racist, but Cook keeps pointing out that his white female and black male protagonists have an enviable friendship. Is the reader supposed to thank the author for his progressive thought? It does not matter to me whether the characters are black, Asian, Hispanic, European or Pacific Islander because all I care are about the character dynamics and the story. I'm glad that Lynn and Michael are good friends disregarding their race, but I believe healthy relationships like theirs are common nowadays and don't need to be hailed constantly.
What could have been a nail-biting thriller ended abruptly on a sour note and I was glad to see the last of it. For good literature's sake, I beg authors to fight against typecasting, not indulge in it. Another review of a disappointing Robin Cook novel, done.
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