Notes from an Apocalypse
Granta 272pp £14.99
The Week Bookshop £11.99
“Mark O’Connell might quietly be thinking that there is a silver lining to coronavirus,” said Colin Freeman in The Daily Telegraph. For by stopping daily life in its tracks and “forcing us into a dry run for doomsday”, the pandemic has made his new book highly topical. Notes from an Apocalypse is a study of “preppers”: those “bands of eccentrics across the globe who are preparing themselves for society’s end”, often by buying up tracts of land in remote places and constructing “vast, bombproof bunkers”. Preppers espouse some pretty wacky ideas – one tells O’Connell that he expects Earth to be hit by a Jupiter-sized planet named “Nibiru” – but he doesn’t dismiss them as “harmless cranks”. Some, he notes, are rich and influential; many are farright fanatics. Written in a “brilliantly wry style”, this is a funny, thought-provoking and often alarming book.
O’Connell discovers that Silicon Valley plutocrats “seem particularly in thrall to a coming apocalypse”, said Tim Adams in The Observer. Is this, he asks, because their wealth gives them
“control-freak dreams of immortality” – or because they understand better than most the “darker implications of the monsters they have created”? In an especially “wonderful” chapter, he travels to the New Zealand hideaway of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel – a billionaire and Trump backer obsessed with cryogenics – and takes a dip in his private lake. At the other end of the scale are encounters with “paunchy middle-aged men preparing for the apocalypse by hoarding food and pointless gadgets”, said James Marriott in The Times. O’Connell meets one who “eats his entire supply of freeze-dried food when his wife leaves him because, for all his obsessive preparations for the collapse of civilisation, he hasn’t yet learnt how to cook”.
O’Connell can be both “seriously funny” and “bitingly clever”, said James McConnachie in The Sunday Times. But the best sections of this book are the personal ones. In a “superb set piece”, he describes spending 24 hours alone in the Scottish wilderness, and also reflects movingly on fatherhood. It was becoming a parent that sparked his interest in doomsday scenarios – he feared he was bringing his two children into a world facing a terrifyingly uncertain future – yet as the book progresses, his children give him a sense of hope. For all the anguish and terror that it describes, this brilliant book ultimately arrives, like a “classic pilgrimage”, at a “place of renewal”.