Lawrence Wright’s shockingly timely The End of October is definitely a page-turner, and I cranked through this one in just a few days, quite a bit faster than I usually do, but with ever-increasing exasperation and frustration as I got towards the end of the book. Wright starts off very strong with something that’s obviously been solidly researched and given the current moment is unavoidably intriguing: A new, unknown virus (in this case a lethal strain of influenza of unknown and mysterious origin) is discovered in Asia before making its way around the world, throwing the globe into a state of panic. The setting is not the proverbial “fifteen minutes into the future” but quite obviously “right now,” the president and vice president, never named, couldn’t be more clearly modeled after the current holders of those offices (the VP comes off slightly better than the commander in chief, who suffers an on-camera breakdown that is both utterly over-the-top and the slightest bit satisfying). Dr. Harry Parsons, a heroic (but tortured!) virology expert from the Centers for Disease Control finds himself at ground zero, an internment camp for HIV patients in Kongoli, Indonesia. From there, the plot races forward, following Parsons as he chases the outbreak to Saudi Arabia and beyond.
I was pretty much on board up to and including the scenes in a locked-down, quarantined Mecca full of 3 million hajj pilgrims… Up to that point the book was thrilling and realistic. Wright, who is rightly famed as a writer of muscular and entertaining non-fiction such as Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower and Going Clear, throws in plenty of historical tidbits and informational asides, but these don’t bog down the plot, and some of the fascinating true-life details he drops, like the death of the Russian biological weapons researcher Nikolai Ustinov after he was accidentally injected with the deadly Marburg virus, are sure to stick with me for years to come.
The same can’t be said for the fictional elements of the plot. This book, originally written as a screenplay, is less “Contagion” (i.e. realistic, sober, concerned with everyday heroes) and far more Inferno, an over-the-top, borderline sci-fi potboiler complete with an infallible protagonist with an outlandish tragic backstory, a silver-haired ecoterrorist super villain in a modernist lair, rather dull action, and more. By the time the ever-intrepid Dr. Parsons flees a plague- and war-stricken Saudi Arabia by way of nuclear submarine (amongst the many unbelievable elements of this novel is the fact that the US government (with the active cooperation of the Saudi royal family, no less) can’t manage airlift the preeminent virology expert in the world back to the States), the novel has moved to a realm of utter absurdity, and never turns back. Wright piles on the silly twists and reveals (which I won’t spoil here, but believe me, some of them are doozies), and the reader is left wondering what the point of this book is, in the end… Is this all some sort of crazed origin story for a sort of larger-than-life, post-apocalyptic, Jack Ryan-esque character or something? As the Kongoli virus raged, the world fell into chaos, and the (rather underdeveloped) sceondary characters started dropping like flies, I found myself a mix of bored and irritated.
The publication of this novel was (very savvily) moved up when the Covid-19 pandemic changed life around the world, and it seems like Wright was rushing a lot by the end of the book, with so many crucial moments occurring “off-camera” and so little resolution to any of the characters’ stories (what is the point of Tildy’s narrative? Of Helen’s? Jill’s? Teddy’s? At least the Saudi prince Majid gets to ride off into the sunset on camelback, a tragic nobleman to the end). I don’t need everything wrapped up with a little bow for me but this was a bit much.
I’ve heard that this novel was Wright’s attempt to write a possible backstory to the post-apocalyptic world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but the results are so far off from the level of quality, horror, and surprising humanity to be found in that masterwork (another book that I couldn’t put down and read at a breakneck pace). If the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has you wishing you knew a bit more about the history of pandemics writ large, Wright’s new book will definitely deliver, albeit wrapped up in an over-the-top thriller; a disposable airport read in a time of vanishingly few of us are flaying anywhere. If you want a more nuanced look at a fictional pandemic, I heartily recommend Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, an amazing film that is both sober and realistic and showcases a wide range of actors, both heroic and not, to give the reader a real sense of the the scale of a pandemic (a fave of mine, I had serendipitously rewatched it back in 2019 and again a few months into the Covid-19 lockdown… It definitely holds up). I’m happy that Wright, a quite good writer of non-fiction, is presumably getting rich(er) of his serendipitous release, but I also really hope he goes back to non-fiction from here on out.
