The End of October

The story was pretty good but the writing style felt dated, if it wasn't for the presence of certain cell phones in the story you could have told me it was written in 1995 and I would have believed you.

Grim Michael Crichtonish thriller about a virus that may or may not be the end of civilisation. This book is 70% science and geopolitics and 30% human story. I enjoyed the human element but found the other stuff, for the most part, incredibly tedious but frighteningly close to reality, especially the stuff about Putin. This is not for you if you are feeling a bit shit about the state of the world, it certainly won't make you feel any better. Utterly bleak. Now off to watch some videos of dogs chasing carrier bags.

Wow, wow, wow this is a very timely book and I am floored that Lawrence Wright started it in 2017. It's a playbook for the Covid pandemic we are currently in. A plague overtakes the entire world, Russia is using cyber warfare to knock electric grids out and plant viruses in computer systems, Russia also building up troops on the Ukraine border and antagonizing adversaries. Is this virus naturally occurring or man made? Where did it start? Will civilization survive? This book took me a while to read because it was way too close to current life. I would definitely recommend.

Very good book; highly recommended.

What I don't recommend is reading it in the middle of a global pandemic, as I did.

So, I read this during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right in the middle of it, as the infections in NC are still increasing. Let's start with the book - it's very well done. A pandemic hits the global community and spreads like wildfire. At the heart of the book is a CDC scientist who had worked on bioweapons in his previous career until an event made him realize his research was being used for offense and not defense, so he switched gears to work for the good guys. This book would have grabbed and held my attention even if we were not living through a version of it. This book would be great for book club discussions, as there is a lot to talk about. I would recommend it!
I do want to add my thoughts on reading this book in the current state of the world. We have an author who did research, and found out what might happen with a novel virus that is unleashed in the world, whether intentionally or not. It was shocking that so many things in the storyline have been eerily similar if not exactly what has played out in 2020. If an author was able to figure out what would happen, I am so frustrated and angry that the US government didn't do more in advance of this thing and responding to it. Because if an author had access to all this information, the government does too. Someone somewhere told the people in charge what was coming and what was possible and they didn't react immediately. They still aren't. It's shameful.

It is insane how this book, written before the Covid-19 pandemic, gets so much right about what's going on in our world today. It isn't exactly what we're experiencing, but scary close. I felt he dropped the ball on closure with some of the characters but did a good job with the main character.

Let's give credit where credit is due. Lawrence Wright does his research. He won the Pulitzer for non-fiction for his examination of Al-Qaed. He followed that up with an expose on L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology which got turned into an HBO Documentary. Now he's trained his eye on a possible pandemic for this fictional thriller.

How did he do?

Well, we have a mysterious influenza virus that originates in Asia in the Spring of 2020 that sends economies into a tailspin, shuts down schools, overwhelms hospitals, has the American government playing catch-up while battling disinformation and wild conspiracies. Not too shabby.

The thing is his endgame is the near complete breakdown of human civilization. This was prompted by a question from Ridley Scott who, after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, wondered what would nudge humanity to this dystopian hellscape? And so he ups the ante with a bomb in Rome, rising tensions in the Middle East, and a Cold War threatening to go nuclear with Russia sabotaging critical American infrastructure. Things get pretty dark.

And here's where it veers into airport thriller territory. Unlikely hero, short, stooped and in need of a cane while being the foremost expert in disease that sees him traipsing the globe in a helicopter, private jet and a fast-attack submarine - naturally. He goes from hobnobbing with Middle Eastern royalty to working in the midst of viral hotspots. It's Dan Brown writing a pandemic novel.

So the writing isn't exactly the sharpest, but it's no less a page-turner. Where you find yourself gulping in nervous anticipation is how much he got right so far, and how much more death he predicts will arrive come the End of October.

Scarily prescient