Mainstream Book Review: The End of October by Lawrence Wright - 1. Review The End of October

The End of October by Lawrence Wright

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52669505-the-end-of-october

I avoided this book last year, like the Plague, ironically. I had to pick it up eventually after a while and it took me a long time to finish. Yes, this is a fiction novel with mostly heterosexual characters, but I do read books in the mainstream speculative fiction world as well. My tastes with mainstream fiction can be simply explained as a "love for details”, I love science fiction and speculative fiction for the reason they are intricately structured with complex characters. So this novel is quite timely, being written in 2019 and published just as COVID-19 broke-out with details that reflect the reality of what has happened and what is still happening. It is a fictional story set in contemporary setting, while a virulent pandemic of unknown origin strikes the world, killing millions and perhaps even more in its wake with human reactions and fears.

Author Lawrence Wright is quite well known, he has won the Pulitzer Prize for his non-fiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 in 2007. As a non-fiction author, I know he’s good and analytical on cutting points specific to our flaws as human beings, such as US interagency rivalries/egos or international rivalries/nationalism that allowed such terror to rise. There are no heroes in this book, even the titular main character Dr. Henry Parson is flawed in ways beyond his own disability to the point of arrogance. It’s just people, trying their best and failing because we’re flawed in so many ways, between religion, ideology, and self-interest.

It's an epic novel in scope, 400 pages long and 13 hours 26 minutes on audible. Fair warning, I stopped reading it several times, because of how ugly the book reflects on contemporary society and our breakdown, reading light gay romance to help deal with the gnawing discomfort.

Plot: An unknown disease outbreak has occurred in an Indonesian prison camp for LGBT people, created by the Muslim government to segregate undesirables. There’s some odd indication concerning the disease, so American CDC Deputy Director Henry Parson as one of the world’s foremost experts in infectious diseases is sent to investigate. He discovers that the camp has become an incubator for a deadly virus among the LGBT inmates, who were already immune-compromised from HIV. The virus spreads outside the camp as the taxi driver that brought Dr. Parson to the Camp has left Indonesia for Mecca, the holy city of Islam. The stakes continue to rise, since at the same time, Russia and the US are saber rattling, while proxies in the middle east Saudi Arabia and Iran armed themselves and planned for war. The deputy US Homeland Security director, Matilda, who is of Jewish-Russian descent, is focused on countering Russia at all costs. Saudi Arabia could not contain the outbreak of the new virus, nor can limited containment in Indonesia hold. The virus reaches the US and the bleak depictions of deaths occur. Due to the virus, loved ones die, food shortages occur, children are left orphans to roam the streets, and the worst of human nature is on full display in modern 21^st century America. The President of the United States dies on live television giving an address to the American people, further demoralizing the populace. At America’s moment of weakness, Russian hackers break through key infrastructure platforms, cutting off the internet, television, gas, and electricity. In retaliation for what it viewed as both a cyber and biological attack, the US destroy Russian military assets and causes several nuclear meltdowns in power plants as clandestine operations to irradiate large swath of Russia from Kursk to Moscow. Neither side has openly used their ICBM arsenals, not willing to end humanity, but unwilling to forgive the other for slights or actions carried out since the outbreak. As all this occurs, Dr. Henry Parson seeks to find a way home and end the curse of this virus, while his family struggles to survive the new America. The ending will reveal what was the origins of the virus that killed so many people and has driven mankind to the brink of Armageddon.

Review: If you want to read a horrible what-if scenario of the future, The End of October, will give you all you can ask for and far worse. Nuclear annihilation is a quaint 20^th century notion; retrospectively, we know it was unlikely and no one with any sense of human civilization would wish to end our species like that. However, biological warfare and dangerous miscalculations of “proportionate-response” are far more likely to lead to Armageddon all the same. That’s the theme behind Lawrence Wright’s 2020 best seller, none of these people are innocent in what they are doing or how they approach the world, not even kids. We as a society, and readers, are complicit in our own slow and progressive destruction: from national leaders in the middle east playing US and Russian interests against one another for their religious wars, the political rivalries in a Trump-like US Presidential Administration, health officials who act in a complacent manner trying to stem the tide of an unknown disease, and common people, who hoard food, create black markets, and so much more in the horrible maelstrom of a pandemic-stricken society.

While the book highlighted Dr. Henry Parson as a hero with all the actions he took to combat and discover the origins of the fictional pandemic, he is not a true hero. At best, you can argue he’s an anti-hero on a path of redemption for his past sins, but failing woefully and ultimately causing far more destruction in his wake. As a reader, I do hold him personally responsible for leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves in the middle of social upheaval and depravity that I will not spoil for any interested reader. I understand that he’s the deputy director of the US’ CDC and head of the infectious disease prevention program, a former US bioweapons expert, and probably the most likely person on earth to combat the greatest danger to humanity since the Black Death. However, he allowed his own family obligations to fall to the sideline as he goes globetrotting to try to fight an illness that he felt personally responsible for unleashing, because it was his taxi driver that infected millions more due to the Muslim pilgrimage. I get why he does what he does and when you learn about his background including the reason why he’s an atheist, you will understand why as well. However, he’s a deeply flawed man, who placed far too much of humanity’s issues on his own shoulders rather than reflect on the reality of situations. It was his recommendations and actions that ultimately caused the war in the middle east, spurned by fears of the pandemic.

The other characters such as Dr. Parsons’ wife, Jill Parsons, whose tragic character arc of a Christian woman finding the world and humanity to truly be amoral, is a dark reflection on our own humanity. Her tale of desperation doesn’t last throughout the book, but you can feel truly how hopeless life had become. She also isn’t a hero in this novel, because ultimately, her decision to return to Atlanta damned her and her children to endless suffering. Readers can argue with me that she did it out of a need for normalcy and family obligations to her elderly mother, whose care home lost most of their staff due to the pandemic (I remembered this scene, when I visited my own grandmother recently. I wept in the empty corridors of the care home, thinking about where we are in the world). She did the right things in a civilized society based on morality and virtue, but they were the wrong actions with humanity regressing to its baser natures.

Parsons’ children, Helen and Teddy were standouts of the novel, but they had to do a lot of things to survive, when they never considered such things necessary, including murder. I loved the scenes of them together, because they may not be brother and sister’s by blood, Teddy being adopted from Brazil, but they were family by shared love and care for one another. Lawrence Wright doesn’t hide the fact that Helen has mixed feelings for her sibling, nor that she even contemplated some racist thoughts against him, being brown skinned. Yet, she realizes that he’s all the family she has left and he as a younger child with an intellectual disposition would not survive in this new world. When Teddy, who is usually more intellectual of the two had to stand up to protect Helen, I quite literally felt a rise in my chest. Teddy acted as he needed to act for Helen’s sake. Helen realized that Teddy and her would have to survive on their own, together afterward, truly “finding family” with someone she shared no blood with. They aren’t heroes though, they are survivors.

Beyond the main character and his family, others like Matilda, the deputy Homeland Security director, play herself off as a Russian Hawk. She is an old-fashioned Republican operative, a power-broker and ultimately someone who will eventually whisper in the ears of the Mike Pence stand-in, when he assumes Presidency. While you may think she’s a villain, it is fair to say that she’s not a villain. Russian hackers did attack the US infrastructure, in the midst of the outbreak with a dead US president. The virus itself could have been a bioweapon used to target US and its allies. Yes, the evidence is circumstantial, but with the stake being so great, it’s hard to fault the decisions and recommendations she made with her bias views. The irradiation of large swaths of Russia through sabotage and clandestine operations went short of nuclear war, so it just kept escalating. You see what you want to see, sometimes colored by your own hatred or personal bias. Essentially, it describes Matilda, a capable woman wanting to go after an old enemy she's always known, Russia, while her counterparts do the same. Leaders like that will destroy the world out of the belief they are doing right.

Lastly, I honestly enjoyed Lawrence Wright’s portrayal of Majid, the Health Minister and Prince of Saudi Arabia. As a Muslim character with a western medical education, I knew Wright would create a multi-faceted and interesting person. He tries his best to prevent what he knew would be a war that would destroy both Saudi Arabia and Iran, there would be no victors in an all out Sunni versus Shia war. He shows his humanity and love for the people throughout the early part of the book, but ultimately, he is also not a hero. He orders Saudi troops to contain and quarantine 3 million Muslim pilgrims in the holy city of Mecca, which he knew would result in bloodshed. Yes, he wanted to save hundreds of millions if not billions with the sacrifice of 1-2 million people, but such a move would be impossible to accomplish. An interesting character, but sadly, he was a good man that only had bad choices in front of him.

Even during the lull in the pandemic, little touches of things like billionaires being able to afford experimental drugs, propaganda being used to create insurrections in the US, and even a cameo of Alex Jones claiming a conspiracy against christian civilization, gives you an ugly picture of the US domestic home front that isn't too far removed from reality. It's quite scary, especially realizing what the ending actually depicts for humanity's future.

I do recommend this novel for those who enjoy high stake thrillers, massive global destruction, and smaller scale human stories about people struggling to survive impossible odds. It’s not a perfect novel though, there are things in it such as Parsons’ self-righteousness to contain the virus, despite his wife’s pleading. The insane lack of global response and joint security argument with other major powers like EU and China, made this feel almost like a Cold War styled Tom Clancy novel, two superpowers fighting it out being manipulated by bad information. There was even a portion of the novel where Dr. Parson ended up in a US nuclear submarine, I mean how much more Tom Clancy can you get without calling the submarine Red October, (though there is a place in the book called “October Revolution Island”, so maybe there’s some tongue in cheek). I understand what Lawrence Wright’s aim was with this novel and I think he called out some chilling notes, which actually did happen and is still happening with COVID-19, but he fell into tropes established by Clancy far too often and sadly fell flat.

My Rating: 4 out of 5, it’s entertaining, dark, and quite thought provoking. It’s worth a reading for those who dare to journey into the dark corners of a “what-if” pandemic storyline.