Published in 2019, The Trespassers is eerily prescient. The UK is in the grip of a deadly pandemic; its economy has collapsed. Migrant workers travelling to Australia by ship become increasingly wary of one another when an infectious disease breaks out on board, killing some of the passengers. Some recover, but the vessel is branded a plague ship and Australian authorities, spurned on by a hate-fueled public, refuse to allow its passengers to disembark.
All of this is eerily familiar, as are the references to inadequate amounts of PPE on board, the constant spreading of misinformation, the revulsion shown towards anyone who sniffs or coughs, the blustering of those in authority and the selfless acts of kindness and decency from those tending to the sick. How did Meg Mundell get it so right, and tell it with such grace, last year?
And yet the most disturbing part of The Trespassers is when the passengers are finally allowed off the boat, into an isolated detention centre. Here is a fresh kind of unrelenting hell, a void without a way forward. They are forgotten and purposeless; subject to harsh and ridiculous rules and given no information about their fate. The hopelessness of their situation is made all the more vivid for being entirely credible.
The corrupting effect of corporate money and power; a government enslaved to a braying and hateful public; a media incapable of accessing and publishing the truth; Mundell, bless her, leaves no soul unscathed. Thank goodness she allows an element of hope in the ending, or I might have lay on the floor and cried. 4.5 stars.
