Pat Frank’s Alas,
Babylon was published in 1959, and I first read it as a sixteen-year-old in
1964. This is the first time I’ve read it since, but that initial reading
impressed me so much that I still have that particular paperback copy of Alas,
Babylon on my shelves. To understand why this one made such an impact on
me, it helps to remember just how deeply implanted into the minds all of us
growing up in the fifties and sixties the relative likelihood of a nuclear holocaust
was. We were part of that whole “duck and cover” drill process that was going
on in schools all across the country in those days. We took it seriously
because the adults all around us took it seriously.
So along comes Pat Frank
in 1959 with a 315-page novel about what would happen if Russia started firing
missiles at the United States and Western Europe in an attempt to win a nuclear
war via a devastating first strike that would cost millions of lives in a
matter of hours – and suddenly, our worst fears were easier than ever to
picture in our minds. It all seemed very real to someone my age because, after
all, the Soviet Union was already winning the space race, and catching up
seemed to be beyond the capacity of the U.S. space program.
But, as it turns out, Alas,
Babylon is not at all the pessimistic and terrifying book it might have
been. Yes, millions do die, whole cities are wiped out in minutes, and millions
more will die in the months following “The Day,” but those in little Fort
Repose, Florida, are not prepared to give up even then. Randy Bragg is not
going to let them. Mark Bragg, Randy’s brother, is an officer in SAC
Intelligence, and Mark manages both to evacuate his wife and children from
Omaha to Florida and to give Randy a 24-hour heads-up about the impending
doomsday. That little head start would make a difference.
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The core of Alas,
Babylon is, as would be expected, the community’s common effort to survive
the aftermath of being completely cut off from the rest of civilization. Suddenly
responsible for their own food supply, safety, health care, and the like, the
people of Fort Repose soon learn that they will have to depend upon each other
if any of them are to survive the long term – and that thieves will be subject
to the harshest penalty there is. Fans of dystopian novels will find much here
to please them. It can be argued in fact, that books like Alas, Babylon, Nevil
Shute’s On the Beach, Eugene Burdick’s Fail Safe, and Peter
George’s Red Alert created the pattern for most every dystopian novel
that would follow.
Pat Frank’s message,
however, is a bit different than the message sent by most dystopian novels.
Frank does not shy away from showing the reader exactly what the carelessness
and stupidity of the political class might cost the world one day. He doesn’t
linger in the gore, but he does paint a clear enough picture of what would be
lost – perhaps lost forever. Frank focuses more on how much we are going to
miss all the things we destroy, and just how suddenly thousands of years of human
advancement could be made meaningless. Pat Frank, though, has one more message for
his readers, a message of hope - hope that those who survive will be able to
claw back as much of the past as is humanly possible, and that civilization
will survive the worst.
Bottom Line: I’ve seen a
few reviews of Alas, Babylon claiming that the novel is so racist and misogynistic
that it is barely readable. All I can say to those reviewers is that they just
don’t get it. The novel was written in 1958 or 1959, a period during which
racism was more obvious than it is today. Pat Frank makes that racism part of
his story, particularly the way that everyday conversation often included casual
racial and religious slurs, even to using the infamous “N-word” on numerous
occasions in the book. Frank’s main characters, Randy Bragg and his family,
though, are anything but racist in attitude and action. The author uses the
Bragg family to make his points about racism and racists; he doesn’t preach
tolerance, he shows it in action, and he makes sure that one of the key
families in Fort Repose’s survival is a black family, a family that is totally
accepted in the new world in which they find themselves. Read between the lines,
people.