BOOK REVIEWS: "The End Of October" (fiction) and "The Plague Year" (non-fiction), by Lawrence Wright

 

BOOK REVIEWS: 

“The End of October,” by Lawrence Wright   3.5 stars 

“The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid,” by Lawrence Wright 4.5 stars   

Some people watch horror movies for fun, I’ve been reading books about pandemics… during the pandemic.  The latest is journalist Lawrence Wright’s “The End of October,” an eerily prescient novel about a mysterious (did it come from nature or a lab?), ubercontagious, superdeadly flu-like virus that takes the world in a death grip.  The book was completed in 2019, and released in April of last year- just as the coronavirus was threatening to make reality recapitulate fiction.  The greatest thing I took away from this book was a sense of relief: COVID seems like a cakewalk compared to Wright’s world ravaged by the Kongoli virus, which not only is at least a magnitude more contagious and fatal, but also leads to fast and near-complete societal and infrastructure breakdown, and causes world powers to air out their grievances through planet-spanning wars that threaten to go nuclear or biological.  I found myself regularly thinking, “Whew!  It’s not so bad! I’m glad in the real pandemic world it’s nowhere near that scary… yet.”   There are many similarities in Wright’s saga to how the real pandemic has played out, ranging from political incompetence, business profiteering, and pointless bureaucratic obstacles in governments and health agencies, to people becoming intolerant of shutdowns and letting down their guard, venturing out of hiding too quickly and reopening schools too soon, causing new, ever-worse waves of disease, and even ill-advised sanitation theatre: but I guess all of those would be quite predictable in any pandemic.  The protagonist of The End Of October is a moderately-disabled scientist (like me), a renowned globetrotting CDC epidemiologist with a lovely family in Atlanta (like some of my own kinfolk), so I found myself rooting for him: but Wright, who is a journalist by training, doesn’t quite have the novelist’s knack for character development, and some of his attempts, such as a strange detour into the Rocky Mountain wilderness, are out of place, pointless dead-ends.  (This book REALLY could sit on an archetype shelf of “novels written by journalists or professors” genre, which isn’t necessarily a dig- it just is a reflection of style.)  Yet, the science is almost completely well informed: I’d have gotten a great intro course in virology and epidemiology from this book if there had been no COVID-19.  And the action, whether it's the gory and frantic details of the virus playing out in the streets, schools and countryside, or the hero doctor caught in global conflict zones trying to get home to his family and his laboratory while searching for clues to a cure along the way, is engaging and done well for its genre.   That is, until  the ending- which is not only abrupt, trope-filled, and incomplete (actually, any satisfying ending is not really there, as if the book were pushed to market about 20% short of a conclusion once it became clear that a real pandemic was underway) and, for what ***is*** suggested to take place, is completely implausible and a total letdown, implying that a “magical solution” straight out of Google University, 7^th grade edition, was the cure the world’s biomedical experts had somehow forgotten.  An informed author like Wright should have known better.  Still, I’m glad I read this novel.

Wright shines better in more familiar territory, the non-fiction “The Plague Year,” his eye-opening journalistic account of many aspects of the first year or so of the pandemic (primarily from the USA perspective).  He takes us inside the CDC and vaccine-boffin centers, to the halls of power (and backrooms) in Washington and statehouses, including a new view of what was really going on in White House briefing rooms and coronavirus task force (if you think you “get” Dr. Deborah Birx, you may gain a completely new picture of her from this book), to poignant stories of the medical front lines and how hospitals, supply chains, and the health care system and workers were prepared… or not.  There are a few detours a little too far away from the subject at hand that detract from the flow a bit, but if it’s possible to write a kind of popular cultural anthropology or history of an event only months past, Wright has done a solid job here.