A novel presages a dystopian world from a pandemic worse than Covid-19

The End of October, published this April, has at its centre a fictional virus sweeping across the world, forcing people to live under indefinite lockdown, and pushing the global economy disaster.

In early April, Vulture, the American news and culture website, published an interview with Lawrence Wright. The headline simply read: “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. It was an accurate, if slightly ominous, introduction to the man and his work. After all, Wright, a staff writer with The New Yorker, has an inexplicable hunch for all things catastrophic. In 1998, he wrote the screenplay for Denzel Washington-starrer.The Siege, an action thriller that had terrorists rampaging through New York City and setting off bombs. The film turned out to be a box-office dud, but in the wake of the 9/11 attacks three years later, it became the most-rented movie in America.
 
Cut to 2020, and Wright’s prophetic instinct seems to have struck again. His new novel, The End of October, published this April, has at its centre a fictional virus sweeping across the world, swamping health care systems, forcing people to live under indefinite lockdown, and pushing the global economy towards disaster. In short, it is the true story of our times. Except, it’s not.
 
The book, set in the spring of 2020, features Henry Parsons as the protagonist, a senior microbiologist working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who possesses his share of heroic traits: smart, experienced and determined to the point he’ll happily put himself in grave danger over and over again just to save the world. Like many ordinary superheroes, Parsons is also shown living the tedious dual life, one minute discovering dangerous pathogens, the other trying to make it to his son’s birthday party in time.

In 1998, Wright wrote the screenplay for The Siege, an action thriller that had terrorists rampaging through New York City and setting off bombs

But even Parsons, who is always ahead of the game, is unable to prevent the virus — a haemorrhagic fever called “Kongoli”, taken from the Indonesian refugee camp where Parsons first encounters it — from spreading. It jumps from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia and then to the rest of the world. Things come to such a head that they have to shut down the entire city of Mecca after Parsons’ Indonesian cab driver carries the virus to the Hajj.
 
Fiction isn’t one of Wright’s fortes — his most popular book, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which won him the Pulitzer Prize, owed its success to stellar reporting and meticulous research, the kind that thrillingly brought to life the fissures that existed between the FBI and the CIA in the run-up to the cataclysmic event. But it’s clear that he put his reporting skills to similar good use while prepping for The End of October, carefully studying the American healthcare infrastructure and coming to the realisation that the country — and the world in general — was grossly unprepared for a pandemic of such ghastly proportions.

The End of October; Author: Lawrence Wright; Publisher: Knopf; Price: Rs 317 (Kindle); Pages: 400

Which is why the book’s eerily prescient plot makes for frightening reading. It’s not only an acknowledgement of what we’re currently in the midst of, but also a chilling reminder of how things could get much worse. Wright, evidently falling back on his deep knowledge of international politics, further illustrates how political ignorance and ineffective policymaking have the potential to make matters worse.
 
In one of the chapters, for instance, an official is shown briefing a character called Matilda Nichinsky, the US Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security, on the growing threat of the virus, when she’s interrupted and told that the people present “don’t really need a lesson on flu”. Initially only interested in discussing a possible war with Russia, Nichinsky comes to terms with the seriousness of the situation at hand when she’s told that a vaccine will take “months” and millions would perish in the meantime.
 
As the virus acquires the character of a raging beast, the plot moves beyond something terrifyingly reminiscent of our current real-life crisis to one dominated by the flaring up of geopolitical tensions. Iran declares war on Saudi Arabia, stating that the latter is holding its citizens without cause; the US comes under a cyber-attack from Russia; and Parsons, citing the example of the notorious Aum Shinrikyo cult and its leader, Shoko Asahara, hints that a menacing German scientist — a Jürgen Stark with platinum blonde hair, a bit like Javier Bardem in Skyfall — might have something to do with the Kongoli virus. Meanwhile, there are massive food shortages, gangs of orphaned children roam streets filled with corpses, and the US President’s eyes start bleeding on national television.
 
Where Wright’s writing works is in his expert explanation of science, a fair reflection of the immense homework that must have gone into this book. While explaining the origins of his fictional virus, he writes: “Like so many dangerous things in nature, influenza viruses were beautiful, covered with protein spikes called hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, which functioned like a pirate boarding party. The hemagglutinin fastened onto a cell like a grappling hook and plunged viral particles into the cell. Once inside, the virus used the cell’s energy to replicate itself thousands of times”.
 
Even as these long descriptive paragraphs offer fabulous insights into the workings of a virus, Wright’s effort is let down by weak prose. It moves along at a satisfactory pace, but is undone by characters that lack depth, or are emblematic of one cliché or the other. How else do you explain the existence of selfless WHO scientists trying to thwart sinister Soviet ones, or Parsons’ wife telling him that he needs to come back home because “his children need him”?
 
Had this been released in a more normal world, one detached from the prevailing mayhem, The End of October would have made for some decent entertainment at best, a reasonably gripping airport or beach read, perhaps. But just the fact that Wright was able to get so many of his predictions right is the reason that makes the book so exciting — and a little bit disconcerting — to read.
 
Which, perhaps, signals to a larger question: if a shrewd observer like Wright saw this coming and bothered to explore its consequences, the eminent people leading us must have had an inkling of this, too. But clearly, they were too caught up in waging wars or playing politics to do something about it.