Wright’s novel about a virus timely

THRILLER The End of October

By Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf )

The sweeping, authoritative and genuinely intelligent thriller — the sort of novel in which the author employs a bulldozer and a scalpel at the same time — is a rare specimen. Lawrence Wright’s second novel, “The End of October,” is one of these. The fact that it’s about the world in shock and ruin because of a virus similar to the one that causes COVID-19 makes it read as if it’s been shot out of a cannon.

Wright is a Texas-based staff writer for The New Yorker. He’s primarily known as the author of nonfiction books such as “The Looming Tower: Al-qaeda and the Road to 9/11,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and “Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief.” These are serious, well-reported and supple works in which he has command of multiple moving parts.

As a fiction writer, Wright will not make you forget that Ian Mcewan, Hilary Mantel, Don Delillo and Margaret Atwood still stride the planet. His dialogue can be a bit wooden. There is some overbearing psychologidevelopment. A major character dies without the impact the moment might have had.

What he offers in compensation is a great deal of learning about viruses and their attendant political and social horrors; learning that he injects into a maniacal page-turner. He offers the joy of competence — his own as a writer, and the scientific and moral competence of many of the characters he’s invented. At a moment when competence and verity are in short supply at the top, and when our best scientists cannot share their nomenclature and expertise, this is no small consolation, even while reading about humanity coming to a boil.

The protagonist is an American microbiologist named Henry Parsons. This is the sort of novel you can’t help but cast in your head as you skim along, and I imagine Henry as a 40-something Richard Dreyfuss or Bob Balaban.

Microbiologists, in Wright’s telling, are like wolves seeking scents of danger in the wind. The World Health Organization enlists Henry to travel to an internment camp in Indonesia where 47 people have died gruesome deaths from an acute hemorrhagic fever.

Henry thinks the contagion may have been contained, but his own driver has unwittingly been infected and then makes the pilgrimage to Mecca for the annual hajj. At Mecca, he moves among nearly 3 million people, and a pandemic explodes. An attempt is made, with the use of soldiers and barbed wire, to keep the faithful locked inside, as if they were horses in a burning barn. The crowds ultimately escape; soldiers don’t have the heart to mow down fellow Muslims.

The novel virus in “The End of October,” known as the Kongoli influenza, is deadlier than the new coronavirus. Millions die in America, and the world sheds 7% of its population. But reading this book is, for a long while, like reading about our current moment: schools close, the stock market crashes, sports come to a halt, airports shut, millions are thrown out of work.

Governments collapse. There is widespread looting. Supreme Court justices are among the dead, as are, apparently, Taylor Swift, Brad Pitt and Anderson Cooper. Our government is being run from inside a bunker in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There are refugee camps for newly orphaned children. War breaks out in the Middle East. The power grid goes down. Did Russia knock it out? Did Russia release the virus, in an act of biowarfare, in the first place? The smart peocal ple no longer have their money in banks. The smart people, for their own protection, own guns. There are few anchors in normality.

Wright describes people and countries in “a fever of paranoia and hatred, lusting for some kind of orgasmic finale.”

On a more human level, this book is about a man trying to get home to his wife and children in Atlanta, where he works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Henry is away for a long time, attending to one crisis after another.

“The End of October” isn’t Cormac Mccarthy’s “The Road,” but it’s apocalyptic enough. The virus has the world in what Samuel Beckett called, in “Echo’s Bones,” a “long fungoid squeeze.” There are only bad days and worse ones.

This novel’s other major character is Jane Bartlett (Holly Hunter, in my mind), a Southerner and a public health officer. She’s a straight shooter — she calls the virus “this critter” — who warns about the second wave that’s surely coming. “We got smug,” she says, “after all the victories over infection in the 20th century.” She fears that, like Rasputin, this thing will not die.

Along the way in this story, Wright dispenses a great deal of information about contagion in general, from the Black Death and the Spanish flu to MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) to polio and Ebola and AIDS. He considers the history of biowarfare, and fears the things that still might escape from a lab.

This novel’s vague allusions to climate change become, sneakily, a very sharp message. Some things we thought were long buried may be thawing out and reemerging.

Everywhere there is clear writing about pestilence and science. “Like so many dangerous things in nature, influenza viruses were beautiful, covered with protein spikes called hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), which functioned like a pirate boarding party,” he writes. “The hemagglutinin fastened onto a cell like a grappling hook and plunged viral particles into the cell.”

To borrow words from Stephen Jay Gould: “Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.”

There are not many wild hairs in this novel, but before reading it I’d never heard a sunset compared to Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie.”

While we long for that day when we can put COVID-19 behind us, Wright’s novel is here as a real if solemn entertainment, a stay against boredom and a kind of offered prayer for the best in us to rise to the surface.