The End of October by Lawrence Wright
In keeping with my devastating plague theme as kicked off by my rereading The Stand, which was discussed two weeks ago, this week’s book is The End of October, another virus book.Lawrence Wright is a non-fiction author par excellence, to exhaust my knowledge of French. He wrote The Looming Tower, the best treatment of what led up to the attack of 9/11/2001. It paints US intelligence agencies as inept and petty and siloed and turf-bound, not good attributes in an age when much of the world sees America as an evil empire. The FBI and CIA were like the Hatfield and the McCoys; each disliked and mistrusted the other. Wright also chronicles Osama bin Laden’s genius in creating an organization that brought religious zealots, sociopaths, and adventurers together to destroy their enemies. The book won a Pulitzer Prize. The centerpiece of the book is John O’Neill, the FBI’s anti-terrorism chief, who actually understood that al-Qaeda was a serious threat before anyone else did. O’Neill had a wife home in Washington and two or three girlfriends in various places around the country. He was quite the ladies’ man.
Wright also wrote God Save Texas, great fun if you are at all familiar with the Lone Star State.
The End of October, which was released in mid-April, is about a global pandemic that is a lot worse than this one. It’s much deadlier and more contagious and it causes the world to go crazy. The virus gains traction during the Hajj in July, the solemn trip to Mecca made by Muslims who travel there from all over the world. They bring the virus back home. Countries are soon overwhelmed and bad things happen. Saudi Arabia and Iran wipe each other out. Italy, Iraq, Greece, and Lebanon collapse. Russia and the US get into a war. We defeat the Russians militarily, but they come back at us with computer viruses and they shut down our electronic infrastructure through serious hacking, thus crippling the nation.
The vice president is put in charge of the administration’s response to the plague. One book reviewer wrote, “A public health official is in the White House situation room, dramatically telling a disbelieving vice president what the United States will have to do to stem the tide of infection: ‘We need to urge people to shelter in place,’ she says, to blank stares. ‘Borders closed, sports and entertainment facilities shuttered, non-emergency cases discharged from the hospitals, schools closed, public meetings postponed.’ No one in the room really understands what she's suggesting.”
There is no coordinated federal response and the president, who has a tanning bed in the White House, tells everyone not to worry. PPE, diagnostic tests, and ventilators are in short supply, and we can’t get needed drugs because they’re made in India and China. Sound familiar?
This is a novel about a novel coronavirus but the first half of the book is a primer on pandemics. Wright really takes a deep dive in explaining coronaviruses and how they spread. He weaves a history of major plagues throughout the years, with special reference to the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Viruses, he explains, work because they are covered with spikes that function “like a pirate boarding party,” fastening on to a cell “like a grappling hook” to get inside and replicate themselves thousands of times.
The second half of the book - the fiction part - is dark. People turn nasty as a result of the pandemic. There is looting, shooting, rioting, and a general unraveling of society. It gets very bad very quickly. Nations go crazy and lots of bad things go down. The book ends on a cliffhanger of sorts. The end of October is when they expect the second wave of the plague to hit.
All of this negative stuff hasn’t happened around the world regarding our current predicament which is to our credit. If anything, people and countries seem to have avoided bad behavior. In late May, Sophie Gilbert, who reviewed the book in <em>The Atlantic,</em> wrote:
“But the overwhelming individual response to the virus, at least here in New York City, has been one of grief, compassion, and altruism. On daily walks, almost everyone is wearing a mask, accepting the fetidness of sweaty face coverings out of the communitarian hope that not breathing on other people might help flatten the curve. People have volunteered their time and energy to buy medication and food for the immunocompromised.”
This pandemic could be a lot worse. Most people are doing the right thing and taking it seriously, and many are helping others get through it.
Bob’s Take
This is a solid book, although this effort didn’t quite rise to the level of the other two Wright books I have read. (That doesn’t make it Wrong.) The first 200 pages present a good summary of what we know about coronaviruses and pandemics; I learned a lot. The two takeaways for me are: 1) This 2020 pandemic was totally predictable based on various virus outbreaks over the past 100 years or so; and 2) Our world has responded so much better to the disruption caused by the disease than did the world in Wright’s book. This may be due to the fact that his pandemic is much deadlier than ours, and that it was over in a few weeks. That means that lots of bad things happened to fill the vacuums created by the destruction the Wright pandemic wrought.
