A feverish battle against a tiny foe

“THE year was 1883. Cholera had come to Alexandria” -- so ends the first chapter and sets the stage of “An Imperfect Lens,” a striking novel examining the intersection of faith and science amid a massive cholera epidemic in Egypt. The story’s main characters, scientists working under the direction of Louis Pasteur, struggle against time and limited knowledge to identify the microorganism making vast numbers of the population deathly ill.

The actual cholera epidemic and many of the characters in this novel by Anne Roiphe are part of the historical record. There’s Louis Thuillier, a young French man obsessed with finding the cholera agent, who lies to his family in France and takes off for Egypt. He is joined by three others: a veterinarian, Edmond Nocard; a fellow researcher, Emile Roux; and Marcus, a young assistant who’s more focused on finding girls, trouble and money than helping the gifted young scientists.

Under the auspices of Pasteur, the Frenchmen are welcomed to Alexandria with open arms by the local elite, who wait anxiously for the scientists to make the hoped-for discovery.

The cholera epidemic is not just the setting of the tale but also acts as a character like the people whose actions propel the plot forward. Amid the squalid and polluted city, we watch the cholera agent move via its means of transport, water, finding a home in one unlucky person, while another, unaware of the risk at hand, escapes unscathed. The scientists work around the clock, testing everything they can, trying to understand and disable the monstrous microbe.

In many ways, the book becomes a meditation on the dangers of microorganisms and the vulnerability -- although particularly of the Alexandrians -- of every living, breathing human being:

“Without water there is no human life....But out of water, welcome water, needed water, can come our end. And so it was that a sailor [who drank contaminated water] woke in ... bed. He was warm with fever, cold with fever, bowels running, eyes slipping back into their sockets. His barmaid pulled the now odorous sheets out from under his limp body and sent her young daughter to fetch water so she could wash them.... Before dawn the sailor had died, the water in which the sheets had been washed had been thrown into an alleyway where barefoot girls were playing with a wooden doll and the wheels of carts splashed through, catching the water on their spokes and rims.”

Readers follow the trail of water and the dangers it hides as cholera makes its way through the city, smiting the good and bad evenly in its lethal path. The veiled microorganism becomes an insidious evil character whose appearance we fear in a visceral way. “These were crescent-shaped creatures, millions of new moons invisible to the naked eye.... They were stowaways on water barrels, on cracks in the hands and feet, thriving in the dark planks of wood damp with river smell, breeding everywhere in droplets of water, bubbles of organic protein, tiny sacks of floating scythes, so small a foot couldn’t crush them.” Reading the book, one fights the urge to wash one’s hands obsessively.

Braided together with the search for the imperceptible microbe are secondary story lines -- primarily the romance that blooms between the scientist Thuillier and Este Malina, the beautiful and intelligent daughter of a local Jewish doctor. When a rogue character, Eric Fortman, betrays the Malina family (with anti-Semitism given as an unpersuasive contributing factor), the plot feels forced, leaving readers wondering if the romance angle is even needed.

The way Roiphe writes about microorganisms, the illness provoked by them and the blind grasping for answers that animates the scientists is utterly compelling. This novel’s archetypal struggle of man versus nature is played out eloquently and credibly, and though one supposes that the love story may make the science more palatable, this reader would have followed the tale of these foul, malevolent microbes and the scientists’ brave crusade to slay them even without the lure of romance.

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Bernadette Murphy, a regular contributor to Book Review, is the author of three books including, most recently, “The Tao Gal’s Guide to Real Estate.”