Stanley Johnson, father of prime minister Boris Johnson, has announced his 1982 novel, The Virus, will be republished this summer, after a two-week hunt to find a publisher.
Johnson’s novel, which he has advertised as “an urgent, exhilarating novel”, will be published by Black Spring, an imprint of Eyewear Press founded by Todd Swift. Second-hand copies of the book are already selling online for over £50.
Johnson responded to claims of being an opportunist, saying: “Is it opportunistic for journalists and newspapers to be writing about the coronavirus?”
While the novel remains almost identical to the original publication, the title has dropped the word Marburg. Johnson senior has also published a new afterword which reads thus:
“Will the fight against Covid-19 be as successful as my fictional hero was in fighting the Marburg virus? ... Thinking back to my own book, and its eventual happy ending, I can’t help feeling that governments around the world, our own included, need to be ruthlessly focused on the search for an antidote or a vaccine.
“Without in any way diminishing the importance of precautionary measures of containment or mitigation, mass immunisation would surely prove a crucial factor in stopping the spread of Covid-19 or in preventing further outbreaks, e.g. the ‘second wave’ we are hearing about.”
While Swift was unwilling to confirm the exact nature of the deal, he did say that he and Johnson were “able to agree a deal that works for both a smaller indie press and a household British name, to forge a dynamic, unexpected alliance of strengths”.
Johnson’s literary agent, Jonathan Lloyd from Curtis Brown, had said that the novel was presented to a further three publishers prior to the deal with Black Spring, and “did not get a positive response” from the remaining trio.
He said that: “You would think it was a no-brainer, that a publisher would jump up and down at a novel that is already edited and ready to go,” continuing that: “If anyone thought ‘I’m not going to buy it because I don’t like Stanley Johnson’, I think that is rather pathetic.”
The Virus will be republished alongside a reissue of The Warming, another of Johnson’s novels. It is expected to be released this summer.
