Death and the Maiden ... a contagious combination in a tale of bloody

Pest Maiden by Dilys Rose (Headline Review, #9.99) Things are going badly for Russell Fairley. His wife has decamped with a writer who has trashed their marriage in lascivious detail. Fairley's life has become, not just an open book, but an open bestseller. In Eating Passionfruit in Bed he has been humiliated as the character Leslie Little, an egg-headed baldy "more to be pitied than despised". He feels that he has been treated more than a little unfairly.

This mordantly comic novel by Dilys Rose is, surprisingly, her debut as a novelist, her reputation till now resting upon poetry and three short story collections which attracted critical acclaim. Pest Maiden has been eagerly awaited and certainly does not disappoint.

Set mainly in Edinburgh, with scenes in the Grassmarket, in a city centre bookshop and the vennels of the Old Town, the narrative gushes along at a bloodcurdling pace. Blood is the central metaphor, at the centre of all human life: "when it came down to it, blood was about as personal as you could get blood could damn you or save you."

Fairley works in the maintenance section of the Blood Processing Centre in 'Plasma Glen', located off the main arterial route, in the heart of Midlothian. To add further irony, he's haemophobic. Not allergic to the batches of 'slush puppy' or colourless plasma which he shovels down the chute by day, it's the sight of red 'whole blood' that bothers him - he's terrified of what might be in the blood.

And Fairley is in a privileged position to speculate. He's "an integral link in the plasma chain''. And it might be his personal failure, in instructing a nightwatchman over the telephone to remove a vital filter, which lets in the bacterium which has shut the factory down.

"The Pest Maiden's on the prowl" says Todd, Fairley's supervisor. He's an enthusiast of plagues, whose main interests are casual sex in massage parlours and plenty of red meat - but who nevertheless remains as "flash as ever, in a dark suit and hand-stitched tie", with apparent immunity to all diseases and never ill.

The Pest Maiden herself is a metaphor, a kind a medieval scourge - "a tall, gaunt, hollow-eyed bag of bones, her distended shadow slithering across the floor" - and she appears in many guises. As a topless calendar model bathing in laboratory blood; as "the bobbing Madonna", an 8-foot high epoxy symbol "suspended in a clear, viscous liquid" as if "trapped in a test-tube", the vision of which greets visitors to the factory. She's also the sexy solicitor Germaine Shuck; even more alarmingly, she's Arlene, Russell's ex-wife, who may be "a millennial Typhoid Mary". Arlene offers guests to her restaurant, the choice of "listeria, salmonella, E-coli, CJD? Or would you prefer something more traditional?"

It is a bit alarming that the sources of infection in the novel are gendered female. While Fairley has been travestied as the original little man, his ex-wife has become Iona Rivers, whose hidden depths her lover had plunged into.

What is the "interesting material" that lies "deep under the surface" which it takes just the right guy to unearth? Is Arlene the source of the illness from which Russell seems to be suffering?

For Russell, "his entire life felt like an unscratchable itch, a rampant inflammation" but the reader must decide whether he is simply a paranoid obsessed with cleanliness, or whether he is an undiagnosed victim of some as yet unspecified viral infection. We are given regular reports of his symptoms. As a character he seems only slightly impaired; he works, seethes with loathing for Franklin B Fox, and forms a sexual liaison with Filipino lab technician Muriel Gulf.

"Life is a high-risk business," according to Muriel, who isolates herself in the rat-infested middle of nowhere without a phone. But she has guns and plenty of ammunition to deal with intruders, even if only of the rodent variety. Her adolescence was bathed in the blood of the Marcos regime, and her class photograph has ink blots over faces of students who became victims. But Muriel's pink van, in which she makes sporadic raids into the city, is matched by her "coral pink gums and even white teeth". Is she yet another guise of the Pest Maiden?

Russell sits in Muriel's van as they cross the Forth Bridge in search of her father, filled with foreboding and "trying not to think about what might have hitched a ride in his arteries".

Certainly contagious, this clever and witty novel may cause something of a literary epidemic of its own this summer.

Andrew Murray Scott is the author of Insurrection of a Million Minds: The Alexander Trocchi Reader, published by Polygon

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