Tomes for a time of global pandemic
As Penguin rushes to reprint Albert Camus’s classic plague novel, La Peste, there is an appetite for books about the end of days. Our writers select their favourites
The Children of Men by P D James
A rapidly depopulating Britain is ruled by a charismatic but unpredictable leader. Foreign workers are lured here and then forcibly repatriated once they burden the state. Young people are spoiled and entitled. Government is in the hands of a small, secretive group, and everyone is obsessed with puppies and kittens.
This is the 2021 (yep, I know) in which we find ourselves in P D James’s Children of Men, a thoroughly depressing little book that right now seems to get more relevant by the hour, let alone by the decade. The condition gripping the nation is mass infertility — the protagonist’s discovery of a healthy pregnant woman among a group of dissidents is the catalyst for a troubling thriller that ultimately leaves you with the message that really men shouldn’t be allowed to run anything, ever.
It starts with a cough. Then your neck swells, your nose starts bleeding and your eyes bulge out of their sockets. Death comes just hours later. When a US government-manufactured “superflu virus”, engineered as a biological weapon, accidentally escapes from a lab in California, over 99% of the world’s population are wiped out in days. How the tiny handful of survivors navigate their way through what remains of a decimated civilisation is really what King’s superb 1978 post-apocalyptic blockbuster is all about. Forget loo paper and dried pasta, this is the stand between good and evil.
And do get the 1990 revised uncut version. At 1,400 pages, it should see you through the worst.
Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is not a dystopian apocalypse but it is the classic about contagion. Gustav von Aschenbach, an ailing writer in his fifties, comes to Venice seeking to renew his health. Staying at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido, he becomes obsessed with a beautiful 14-yearold Polish boy, Tadzio. Although he learns that the city is in the grip of a serious cholera epidemic, with the streets being disinfected, he cannot bring himself to leave or to warn Tadzio’s family.
Following the boy through the city, von Aschenbach loses him, becomes tormented by thirst and rashly consumes some over-ripe strawberries, as he meditates on love. A few days later, he is attacked by dizziness, “an increasing sense of dread, a feeling of hopelessness and pointlessness, although he could not decide whether this referred to the eternal world or to his personal existence”. As Tadzio’s family prepare to leave, von Aschenbach sees him one last time on the beach, seeming to smile and beckon to him — and he dies where he sits. I last read this story sitting on the terrace of the dilapidated Grand Hotel des Bains, looking out to the Adriatic. And now Venice itself is again gripped by disease, this time coming for us all.
Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel is an early pandemic read (only Daniel Defoe’s 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year precedes it) but it still wins on death count. Literally everyone except the narrator, Lionel Verney, is wiped out by a plague over seven years. The Frankenstein author wasn’t yet 30 years old when she wrote her dystopic fiction, but she’d already lost her husband in a shipwreck and three out of four of her children.
The story ends (spoiler alert) with Lionel visiting Rome, finding a sheepdog and setting sail around the world — an important takeaway for self-isolation. Even if we get to the point of weeks with no human contact, at least we’ll still have the pets.
On The Beach by Nevil Shute
Shute’s 1957 novel is set in Melbourne in the wake of nuclear attack, as a wave of deadly radiation edges from the northern hemisphere — a sci-fi novel that explores the extraordinary psychology of a population suffocated by collective doom. I read it as a teenager and found it chilling and — perversely — thrilling; when I heard that the French were suddenly reading La Peste en masse, it was Shute’s novel that I, strangely, wanted to reach for. The collective doom resonates now, as does the sense of governments trying to react to unprecedented chaos.
Still, Shute’s story is not unremittingly bleak (honestly), and the storytelling is extraordinary.
It feels somewhat counterintuitive to recommend reading a novel that’s set in the wake of a lethal flu that has just wiped out 99% of the global population. And full disclosure: even its author, Emily St John Mandel, has said now probably isn’t the best time to start it. “Maybe wait a few months,” she replied to one curious Twitter mention. “It’s the worst book for aeroplane reading,” she warned another.
That said, in its stark portrayal of life after a pandemic, Station Eleven demonstrates the importance of the things we often take for granted. As a group of travelling musicians begin to contemplate rebuilding civilisation, music becomes a lifeline and an old graphic novel takes on heightened significance.
It’s a timely reminder of working together and recognising what’s important, and that isn’t shattered holiday plans or pesto-less supermarkets.
Shannon Mahanty
The Road by Cormac Mccarthy
You want cheerful escapism? Avoid Cormac Mccarthy’s The Road like the plague. Yet I know few books that make me want to hold loved ones closer. The cause of this ashen end of days is never clear — it could be Covid-19, it could be runaway climate catastrophe, it could be a radioactive lemming — but it’s the spectacle of death and destruction that looms over the novel and haunted readers years beyond its pages. An unnamed father holds his son close as they trudge through an existence rendered pointless, save, crucially, for the fact that they have each other. The future is too short, the end all too near.
“What would you do if I died?” the boy asks his father. “I’d want to die, too,” he replies, with blunt tenderness. You’re never in total isolation when you can think of those you truly love.
Samuel Fishwick
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Not to panic anyone unduly but there’s no loo roll in the supermarket. To get in the spirit of things, Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy imagines a world where children from impoverished districts are randomly selected to fight each other to the death on live TV. The champs can move to the shiny Capitol where the rich live. But there’s always the option to save your chosen loved ones from fighting by yelling, “I volunteer as tribute!”, something we may now find ourselves declaring every time we step out of self-isolation to go to Sainsbury’s.
Bonus: there’s more “will they, won’t they?” tension in the love triangle between Katniss Everdeen and Peeta and Gale than the entire series of Love Is Blind.
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