Apocalypse now! Meet the preppers

Michael Kerr admires the foresight of this funny, wise journey to find the people who believe the end is nigh

TNOTES FROM AN APOCALYPSE by Mark O’Connell 272pp, Granta, £14.99, ebook £14.99

his review will be overtaken by events. It’s bound to be. While I was reading the book, its writer posted a picture on Twitter of the contents of a box he had just opened at home. “Who could have predicted,” he asked, “that these copies of the US edition of my book about apocalyptic anxiety would be delivered by a guy in a face mask, and that I would open the box using plastic gloves?

Not me!”

He’s being a little hard on himself. He was well ahead of most of us, already up and on the road long before the Four Horsemen appeared on their mounts in the Chinese city of Wuhan. See that title: Notes from an Apocalypse.

Mark O’Connell is a journalist and essayist. He won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize for To Be a Machine, an exploration of transhumanism, a movement that suggests we can and should exploit technology to “improve” the human body and, ultimately, make ourselves immortal. He is also the father of two young children, and constantly worrying over what sort of world he’s brought them into.

It’s a world where lies as well as germs go viral, where we humans are making the weather, where old alliances and certainties are being overturned, and where the moneyed are readying to leave the rest of us behind, having bought bunkers in the middle of nowhere, bolt-holes on the other side of the world, or tickets to a life on Mars.

The signs of apocalypse, he reckons, are all around, and while he’s anxious, he’s also intrigued. So off he goes on a series of “perverse pilgrimages” to the places where the end-times seem closest – from South Dakota, with its underground shelters offering “turnkey apocalypse solutions”, to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where the abandoned city of Pripyat is “a fever-dream of a world gone void”. In between, he examines the tech billionaires’ fixation with New Zealand, mixes with the Mars Society in Los Angeles, and joins an environmentalists’ retreat in the Scottish Highlands. He has sessions with his therapist, and draws on the work of writers as varied as

Carl Sagan and Dr Seuss. The result is a book that’s fretful, wise and funny, and often all three in the space of a paragraph.

O’Connell thoroughly skewers

America’s boasting “preppers” with a story about one who began eating into his freeze-dried rations – because his wife was away, he couldn’t cook and it didn’t occur to him to phone for pizza. Then he tells of a friend of his who works in publishing, who reveals that she has a “go-bag”, ready to be hauled out from under the bed at a moment’s notice.

His friend sees something exciting in the prospect of testing herself and her limits. O’Connell doesn’t: his comfort zone, he says, is one with four walls, good Wi-Fi,

One prepper eats his freeze-dried rations because his wife is away (he can’t cook)

THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING by Deborah Levy 208pp, Penguin, £8.99

This exquisitely constructed novel of recurring images and motifs, split between the end of the Cold War and the day after the Brexit referendum, is a sharp meditation on AngloEuropean relations since the war. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize, but really should have won it.