Some books find you at the right time. My latest featured novel is a good example. Coming into my hands shortly before the year anniversary of the first UK coronavirus lockdown, In the Company of Men by the Côte d’Ivorian poet, novelist and artist Véronique Tadjo, translated by Tadjo with John Cullen, offers a salutary reading experience and sheds fresh light on the pandemic.

First published in French in 2017, the book centres on the Ebola epidemic that swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014-16, claiming thousands of lives. Told in multiple voices – from those of medics and aid workers, through victims, to trees in the forest and even the virus itself – it provides a startling, holistic and shaming look at the way human beings use and abuse the natural world, forcing the reader to acknowledge the role of the resultant imbalance in causing sickness.

Novel is really the wrong word for this book: it is an ecosystem of a narrative. Registers vary from the mythic to the mundane. Reportage runs alongside the prophetic pronouncements of the baobab tree, which sits in judgement on the arguments of the virus and the bat, as each puts forward its view on where the blame should lie for the catastrophe the book portrays.

It could feel bitty, but Tadjo’s skill shines through in the way she makes each segment contingent and connected. Just as ‘Humans need to recognize that they’re part of the world, that there’s a close bond between them and all other living creatures, great and small,’ so each account exists in relation to those around it, informed, enriched and sometimes undermined by what follows or goes before.

There are plenty of shocks along the way. From the accounts of the Ebola orphans shunned by their communities to the practical and psychological difficulties of dealing with infectious corpses, not to mention hospital doctors reduced to asking patients to go out and buy their own medical supplies, this book does not pull its punches. The passages concerning the financial roadblocks on vaccine development, when considered against the lightning-fast response to a virus menacing the affluent global north, make for particularly uncomfortable reading.

However, perhaps the greatest jolts come not from what is strange but rather what is familiar in the experiences described. So much of what we have all lived through over the past twelve months is present in this pages – economic upheaval, the lottery of how someone will respond to treatment, conspiracy theories, the concern for children missing out on education. When reading this book, what has felt like a voyage into the unknown for many of us reveals itself to be a path already trodden by millions – a realisation that makes the following appeal by a regional governor particularly chilling:

‘If I, as someone on the ground, were asked to make a comment, I would address the international community. I’d tell them that fear can provoke a strong reaction, which will in turn free up enormous resources and placate public opinion. But the outcome will not necessarily be the best in the long run. […] Are we better prepared if disaster strikes again, or has everything fallen into oblivion already, crowded out by the thick bustle of our days?’

This book will present challenges for readers used to anglophone novels. Tadjo does not give us individual characters to latch onto through the course of the narrative: humanity, rather than a particular person, is the protagonist here. What’s more, she is her use of citations is more expansive than many might be used to. Among other things, this novel contains the longest Bible quote I have yet to encounter in fiction.

Still, the humaneness of this piece of writing wins through. Humankind is presented in all its ugliness, beauty, generosity and vulnerability. In spite of the damage we have done, Tadjo tells us, we are worth saving. ‘The life of humans is a story we haven’t yet finished telling.’ Perhaps, if we follow this novel’s prescriptions, we may yet have some wonderful chapters to enjoy.

In the Company of Men (En compagnie des hommes) by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author with John Cullen (Other Press/Hope Road Publishing, 2021)