The End of October by Lawrence Wright. Transworld, 2020, electronic edition.
In happier times, this novel might have been a minor blip on the reading public’s consciousness – maybe considered to be just another one of those “doomsday” potboilers, good for reading on the beach (remember the beach?) or in front of a fire or heater during winter evenings, with a snifter of cognac and a cigar close at hand (remember those?).
Or perhaps it might have joined the surprisingly long list of both fictional and non-fictional books about plagues and epidemics [1]. Wright is, after all, no lightweight. He’s a highly thought-of journalist who made a name for himself with the non-fictional The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), which won several major awards including the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
But here’s the thing about The End of October. Although the book was published on 28 April 2020, Wright began writing it in 2017, submitting his final draft in mid-2019. So?
So ...the novel virus at the centre of the book first emerges in east Asia. Soon it sweeps the globe, killing millions. In the US, businesses are closed, airports are deserted, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) can’t produce a cure, let alone a vaccine. Meanwhile, the president, who has a tanning bed in a special Cosmetology Room in the White House (loc. 3242), seems baffled by what’s happening and calls in his devoutly religious vice-president to lead the nation’s ineffectual response to the pandemic. Sound familiar?
Not that Wright thinks he’s prescient. He’s explained that Ridley Scott, the filmmaker, suggested to him that he work on a scenario in which “civilization” had collapsed. So, Wright wrote a screenplay about “what could have cracked civilization”. One thing that seemed most likely to him “was a pandemic, something that’s built along the lines of the influenza of 1918, but in a modern era when the disease outpaces any attempt to pause it. And it was meant more as a cautionary tale for some future event, not something that would race ahead of the publication of [my] book”.