The End of October by Lawrence Wright

Knopf, 400 pages, $27.95

Just in case actually living through a pandemic isn’t enough suspense for you, Lawrence Wright, usually a writer of nonfiction, has issued a companion piece to our actual COVID-19 crisis. Yes, you can sit at home while isolating and read about a fictional pandemic that eerily mirrors our own … up to a certain point. With luck, most of his book will prove to be just fiction.

In “The End of October,” a virus has gotten loose in the world. The people in the book wonder about its origin. The world governments, too, think devious thoughts about each other. Was the virus concocted in a laboratory and either maliciously or accidentally let loose? The virus seems to be especially virulent. Good old Asia seems to be implicated. But Russians are mysteriously not falling victim to the virus as much as other countries, like the U.S., for example. Hmm.

Wright’s story starts in Indonesia, in an HIV camp. The medical personnel sent to help the camp have fallen silent. Dr. Henry Parsons of the CDC in the U.S. is sent to investigate. He thinks he will be away a couple of days from his loving home in Atlanta. But this is what he finds: The medical personnel are dead. Transmission is fast, and the already vulnerable people in the camp have caught what appears to be a highly lethal virus. 

Unfortunately, before he can be caught, a carrier of the disease — Henry’s cab driver — travels to the hajj in Saudi Arabia. And — bammo! — thousands of pilgrims are infected. Now everyone can blame Asians, Muslims, homosexuals, the W.H.O., Russians … wait! A lot of this sounds familiar. Here’s something else familiar: Medical facilities are overflowing, there’s a shortage (but maybe not as bad as we have it in real life) of PPEs, grocery store shelves are empty, and people get their guns out.

And where is Henry? About half of the book is our world today, governments and health organizations struggling to contain and understand the virus. It’s full of realistic details, including appearances by real people doing their real jobs in a fictional setting. Real medical pioneers are honored in their mentioning. Henry navigates this real-world mirror, initially going from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia.

The second half of the book? Yikes! If you want to feel better about our current situation, Wright shows you how it could get so, so, so much worse. I don’t think Wright meant to release his book in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t think Wright means to make us feel worse or more helpless. If it’s of any consolation or interest, the fictional U.S. government seems to be almost as clueless and ineffective as our real one.

It is the second half of the book that takes us more into the personal lives of a couple of the main characters. This is where humanity lies. It is the heroic struggle of a few to survive. It is the bad of Henry’s past that drives him relentlessly to help mankind through the crisis. It is his love of the goodness in his present life that leads him to frame the philosophical question Why? and then to try to answer that. But make no mistake, the second half is not primarily about existential fumblings, it is about how the world, as individuals and as communities, answers a serious threat.

I found the crisis details absorbing, though mighty unsettling.

I read the book. I survived it. I even cautiously recommend it. We are a nation divided by people who read and listen to C-19 information and those who assiduously avoid it. I’m not certain this book qualifies as news you can use, but it is an insight into how difficult it is to dissect a virus and develop an effective fix. So maybe people of either inclination can read “End of October” with interest.