Current Reading: Lawrence Wright's The End of October

 

I am about halfway through Lawrence Wright's The End of October. I am enjoying this book. It is a fictional story about a viral pandemic, so it seems close to the present coronavirus pandemic, although the situations are not the same.

If you are looking for literary fiction with deep characters and very well crafted sentences that avoid cliche, this book will disappoint you. The strength of the book is that it focuses on understanding exactly how an infectious disease might sweep across the world. 

I think Scott Detrow in his review on NPR gave some good reasons for why you might want to read this book:

The End of October is more Clancy than Camus: a fast-paced thriller with big, sweeping, made-for-the-adapted-screenplay action sequences, but populated by one-dimensional walking resumes who speak in paragraph-long expository chunks. There are submarine chases that channel Tom Clancy's The Hunt For Red October, and silver-haired, umlauted ecoterrorists who remind you of Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond villains.

But given Wright's journalistic track record — he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower, in my mind the best book written about the 9/11 terror attacks — that clunky expository dialogue is the unexpected star of the novel. Wright clearly did his homework researching this book, and given his reporting background, couldn't resist sharing every fact about pandemics, infectious diseases, public health planning, government disaster contingencies and vaccines that he dug up. And while in other times, it might come across as forced and clunky, we readers are currently in the market for exactly that: Every single fact a great reporter like Wright has learned about pandemics.

If they all come couched in sometimes-awkward writing, it's no problem! After all, it's hard to criticize characters for continually working facts about the 1918 flu pandemic into every conversation, when we're all doing the exact same thing.