to the friend who did not save my life. (hervé guibert, tr. linda coverdale)

Guibert’s novel à clef recounts the onset of his becoming HIV positive in the mid eighties. The novel is composed of a round hundred chapters of a few pages each. There’s something deterministic about this decimal figure. It is a countdown, we come to realise, to the irreversible triumph of the disease over his body. Whilst the novel does not take us up to his death, he lived for several more years after its publication, it is clear to the author and hence the reader that there will be no long term salvation. The friend referred to in the title, Bill, is an American medical entrepreneur who initially suggests that a cure has been found and then back pedals. Of course, ultimately, drugs were developed which put the disease into remission, but they came too late to save Guibert.

The Aids Epidemic feels like it belongs to another era. It has, of course, now been superseded by another epidemic whose impact on society as a whole mirrors the impact Aids had on the homosexual world, and large parts of Sub Saharan Africa. However, perhaps history will note the two epidemics as reflections of common problems of modernity. The incidence of airline travel in their rapid spread, the way in which it might be argued that both epidemics were the result of humanity seeking to impinge on the natural world without realising the inherent risks. During the eighties, the fear of Aids was tangible. Guibert’s account offers a coruscating insight into the sense of finding oneself trapped by a threat whose existential rage left people feeling like flies to the gods. Even people as sure of their deific powers as Michel Foucault, who appears in the novel under the guise of the author’s friend, Muzil.

Foucault died of the disease in 1984, as ever ahead of the curve. By 1986 I was studying a man whose influence was only just starting to become exponential. I had no idea he had died of Aids, neither did my tutor. Guibert’s novel, published in 1990, was one of the reasons this came to light. By the mid nineties I was fundraising for the Terrence Higgins Trust and the Mildmay Centre in Shoreditch. One of my colleagues was taking retroviral drugs, according to a strict timetable, which not only kept him alive but permitted him to live an active, normal life. In the space of a decade, Aids had become part of the mainstream but it had also been tamed. Had Guibert contracted the disease a few years later he would never have written this book, which is a testament to how fast history moves, but also how ignorant we remain of the subterranean channels which shape our present.