The End of October - Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright’s pandemic novel The End of October was published on April 28, 2020, meaning that it was probably pretty much written, edited, and in the hands of his publisher by the time our own real-world COVID-19 pandemic was really hitting its stride. If that assumption is true, the first half of Wright’s novel rather uncannily tracks what we’ve gone through with COVID-19, including even our silly arguments about the effectiveness, or non-effectiveness, of face masks. But that should not really be as surprising as it may at first glance seem to be because Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker who, beginning with 1979’s City Children, Country Summer, has produced a string of ten carefully researched nonfiction books. In the process, Wright won a Pulitzer for 2007’s The Looming Tower and a National Book Critics Circle Award for 2013’s Going Clear. Wright used those same research skills in preparation of The End of October, and it shows.

 

            “Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than the human imagination.”  (Page 22)

 

Dr. Henry Parsons first hears of the Kongoli virus at a “parliament of health officials” in Geneva, Switzerland. The next-to-last presentation of the last day of the conference focuses on an unusual cluster of forty-seven bloody deaths in a West Java refugee camp (although it turns out that the camp is actually a prison for Muslim homosexuals). Parsons does not believe the official Indonesian government explanation of the deaths, so he agrees to collect samples from the camp for further study before heading home to Atlanta. But as it turns out, he will not see Atlanta, his wife, or his two children again for a long, long time.

 

Within hours of his arrival in the squalid camp, Parsons is convinced that an unidentified virus is responsible for the horrendous deaths – and that he has made a terrible, perhaps fatal, mistake by not quarantining his driver before the man could drive away on his own. By the time the driver could be tracked down, he was on the hajj to Mecca along with millions of other devout Muslims. And now everything that can possibly go wrong, is about to. A highly contagious flu virus with a death rate of close to 50% is about to be unleashed on the world.

 

Lawrence Wright

The second half of The End of October (which is a reference to the expected timing of the second wave of the virus) is more dystopian than the first half of the book. Just about the time that the virus seems to have passed its peak (the old flattening of the curve theory we are all so familiar with by now), “the lights go out” in the United States because the dictators in Russia, Iran, and North Korea (and perhaps others) decide that this is the perfect time to launch an all-out cyber-war against America. But as catastrophic as this second scenario is, it all feels a little rushed and somehow fails to pack the punch provided by the earlier part of Wright’s story.

 

Bottom Line: The End of October is one of those thrillers (cliché warning) pulled from today’s headlines and, as such, it can be nerve-rackingly scary to read this one at times. Wright’s story also includes concise accounts of the major pandemics that have plagued the world in the past and how those were either dealt with or played themselves out. It’s impossible to put a happy face on this one.