I picked up Lawrence Wright’s pandemic thriller at the Public Library Association annual conference at the end of February, just before the seriousness of the real-life coronavirus pandemic in the United States crested. Two weeks later, my library closed to the public, and the rest of the country soon followed.
I hardly thought a novel about a pandemic would be my book of choice during those early days of the crisis in my part of the world. Yet I found myself returning to it, reading a chapter or two a day, comparing Wright’s fictional pandemic to our own ongoing one with fascination.
The End of October is a medical thriller about a flu (called Kongoli) pandemic, and as a novel, I can’t say it’s that good. Wright is best known for his nonfiction works, including The Looming Tower (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize) and Going Clear (my personal favorite), as well as being a staff writer for The New Yorker. He’s an expert researcher and practically peerless when it comes to distilling that research into long-form narratives that are accurate, nuanced, interesting, and accessible to most readers.
As a novelist, however, I found his writing lacking. The story mostly follows Henry Parsons, a microbiologist and epidemiologist who works for the World Health Organization and is the first to discover the outbreak of a new, deadly flu in Indonesia. While he comes to terms with just how serious this disease is (the fatality rate is extraordinarily high – most people who contract it die), he fails to stop its spread – his driver unknowingly contracts it and goes on Hajj to Mecca, along with millions of others.
As Henry travels around the world, researching the disease, its potential source (a lab in Russia? a lab in the United States? an ancient woolly mammoth unearthed by melting permafrost?), and a vaccine, we’re also treated to random chapters from other characters’ points of view, many of which could be intriguing but are ultimately head-scratching in their lack of necessity. Most of the characters, even Henry, feel very surface. Chapters read like sketches or parts of an outline rather than anything that builds true tension or makes readers feel anything for the characters. Tragedies feel laughable and characters’ backstories melodramatic instead of sad or alarming. A particularly bad chapter begins with a sentence announcing a character’s death without preamble, and it feels so dry and emotionless, I had to go back and re-read the previous chapters to ensure I didn’t miss anything. It’s so disappointing in part because the real-life people Wright writes about come to life on the page.
What kept me reading were the true bits, the bits at which Wright excels: how viruses begin, how they spread, how vaccines are created, the history behind viruses and vaccines, and how societies react (for good or for ill) to pandemics. It was fascinating to compare Wright’s fictional flu virus to our real coronavirus, especially once the economies in his book started to shut down as ours were at the time. I was fascinated by the similarities between the race for a vaccine in Wright’s book to the race in the real world (scientists in The End of October also experimented with antibody transfusions), as well as the history behind vaccines. Every time I video chatted with friends while reading this book, I had a new tidbit to share, such as a technique called variolation that involved putting smallpox scabs inside a scratch on a healthy person’s skin to cause a reaction and ultimately inoculate them.
Living through something so similar to Wright’s characters drives home the huge amount of research he did for his book and makes his premise scarily plausible. Despite how awful the coronavirus pandemic currently is, the flu pandemic in The End of October is infinitely more terrifying, and some readers may feel (fleetingly) grateful for the relatively low fatality rate of COVID-19 compared to Kongoli. There are so many tantalizing nuggets of real information in this story that it’s still worth a read, despite its shortcomings as a novel.
After living through the pandemic for over two months now, though, I’m glad I read and finished this book early on. It’s certainly not something I’d choose to read now, after the changes in our lives and the daily death counts have become the new normal. I wonder if Wright’s book is doing better or worse than expected because of the pandemic – pandemic and other disaster movies were top 10 picks on Netflix for several weeks, but at the same time, editors are actively avoiding pandemic and dystopian fiction as a result of the crisis. Perhaps in a few years, though, I’d be interested to read Wright’s nonfiction account of the coronavirus pandemic, if he chooses to write one; he’s already started the background research with this novel.
