The End of October by Lawrence Wright (Knopf)

Reading The End of October as a novel brings on a strong case of deja vu. A leading epidemiologist travels to a refugee camp in Indonesia where he finds a hemorrhagic virus with a horrifying fatality rate has taken hold. Unfortunately the man who had driven him to this death site immediately goes on hajj to Mecca where three million potential victims are gathered. As cases begin to spread among the faithful, the holy city is cordoned off and the world begins to characterize this as a Muslim disease. 

As the general public learns of this new virus, the novel corresponds to what we’ve experienced in 2020. People rush to stores, frantically buying and hoarding groceries, pharmaceuticals, face masks, and guns. Schools are closed, hospitals accept only emergency cases, the National Guard is called into play. Shelter in place goes into effect. Separated from his U.S. family, the epidemiologist fights to return to them while desperately searching for the source of the virus and hoping to discover a vaccine. 

But this isn’t just another end-of-the-world potboiler. Lawrence Wright is a journalist who won the Pulitzer for his book on 9/11, The Looming Tower, and his latest book is more a work of investigative journalism than it is a novel—and it’s horrifyingly prescient. Researched and written long before the emergence of Covid-19, The End of October is filled with information about the history, behavior, and deadly potential of coronaviruses.

Unlike the scourge in this novel, Covid-19 is not an influenza virus, but a novel virus, one never found before in humans. This was also true of the Spanish Influenza of 1918, “a more dreadful adversary than...ever encountered, with victims that could be “fine at lunch, dead by dinner.” Wright’s fictional virus, the Spanish Influenza, and Covid-19 all share a deadly characteristic: They correspond to no previous strain and there’s no built-up immunity to them anywhere in the world.

Like Wright’s invented disaster,  Covid-19 is an RNA virus, part of a group that’s “constantly reinventing themselves over and over again in what’s called a “mutant swarm,” as Ebola did. 

The viral world is a daunting one, found in the ocean as well as on land. “A single liter of seawater contained about 100 billion of them, 90% of them unknown to man.” “More than 800 million viruses,” researchers say, “are deposited every day on every single meter of the earth’s surface. Most...preyed on bacteria, not humans.” 

Viruses are a large part of the natural world whose purpose hasn’t yet been discovered, infecting a cell and then using  “the energy of the cell for reproduction,” eventually turning the infected body “into a virus factory.” And historically viruses come in waves, with  a “cruel intermission” followed by a second wave that’s worse than the first, as was true of the Spanish Influenza.

Wright suggests viruses are a force of nature, untamable, capable of “consuming human history.” The 1918 epidemic took more lives than the combined deaths of combatants during World War I, yet that killer-lnfluenza was essentially erased from history, its terrible lessons ignored.

Perhaps The End of October will awaken humanity to the knowledge of what a pandemic is capable of doing. It could become the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of today’s world, with its fictional narrative drawing its readers’ attention to its careful research and horrifying, illuminating facts. Let us hope.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books