A novel about a pandemic reads like nonfiction
There are immeasurable ways to spend one’s free time in the Age of COVID-19, as anyone nursing a sourdough starter, learning to sew masks or making Joe Exotic memes can tell you. Due to the absence of pandemics in modern American history, though, one of the more popular diversions is entertainment dealing with the topic, as evidenced by the skyrocketing popularity of media such as Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film “Contagion” (now one of iTunes’s all-time bestsellers) and Stephen King’s 1978 opus “The Stand” (currently in Amazon’s Top 20 Most Read Books list).
In the midst of this rising interest comes “The End of October,” a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lawrence Wright, and its apocalyptic vision and eerily accurate predictions are the closest readers may get to understanding the crisis we are facing. Mr. Wright’s vision of a world faced with a novel influenza virus is so firmly rooted in 2020, it is impossible to read without comparing it to the crisis unfolding around us in real time — and just as impossible to forget the book’s lessons.
When the book begins, Dr. Henry Parsons is attending a World Health Organization conference in his capacity as the deputy director of infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As part of the audience for a presentation on a mysterious illness at a refugee internment camp in Indonesia, Henry is unconvinced by the flippant explanation made for the outbreak and decides to investigate the camp himself.
Upon his arrival at the camp, Henry is horrified to find not only dead civilians but dead doctors as well. He conducts a brutal field autopsy, revealing the disease is a form of hemorrhagic fever with a startlingly high mortality rate, after which Henry immediately quarantines himself and pushes for stringent contact tracing.
Only one contact eludes the professionals, however: the cab driver who brought Henry to the camp in the first place — and has since left Indonesia to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are required to make at least once. Because hajj only takes place over a few specific days each year and draws millions of pilgrims from all over the world to Saudi Arabia, the
crowded conditions could lead to an explosive outbreak, and Henry’s race against time to find his driver kicks off a fast-paced plot that mirrors the speed with which the new virus, dubbed Kongoli, travels from person to person.
“The End of October” follows a familiar trajectory for works about pandemics by following the contagion from its initial appearance to global chaos, and as such it shares a lot of narrative DNA with books like “The Stand” or even Max Brooks’ zombie masterpiece “World War Z” (2006). Mr. Wright’s deployment of his expert research, however, means his story reads more like nonfiction, akin to Richard Preston’s classic 1994 book on the Ebola virus “The Hot Zone.”
Although the fear engendered by an invisible enemy is certainly scary on its own merits, this book is particularly terrifying because of its excruciatingly well-observed contemporary setting, which leads readers to make unavoidable comparisons with the actual global reactions to the novel coronavirus. At times, Mr. Wright’s prescience is almost unbearable: A government official bemoans the country’s lack of preparedness, specifically noting insufficient supplies of ventilators, test kits and personal protective equipment. The quasi-fictional president is “… almost entirely absent in the debate about how to deal with the contagion, except to blame the opposing party for ignoring public health needs before he took office.” World powers accuse each other of creating the virus. Protests against precautions break out. Conspiracy theorists seize the moment to foment unrest.
Downbeat though the book may be, there are a few things that it reminds readers to be thankful for: COVID-19 is a far less deadly disease than the fictional Kongoli, animals don’t seem to be spreading it alongside us, and at this point most Americans have been far more receptive to protective measures than those in the story. Yet the underlying message of “The End of October” is the sheer inevitability of global pandemics, the necessity of humanity’s embrace of that fact, and the disastrous consequences if we don’t. As one character points out, “If we’re going to save civilization, we have to fight together and not against each other.” Whether we emerge from 2020 having learned that lesson, we can be sure that nature, one day, will make us face it again.