Synopsis
At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution.
As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.
Review
COVID got you down? Need to read something that will make you feel better? This may not be the book for you–unless you count seeing how much worse it could be among the things that will make you feel better. This is the tale of another novel coronavirus that rampages across the globe, but it packs way more of a punch. Here “the end of October” is, well, possibly the end of us. But for the grace of the virus gods, there go we…
The hero of this suspense thriller/science documentary is Dr. Henry Parsons, epidemiologist extraordinaire with some heavy physical and mental baggage to carry. He leaves his Atlanta home “for a couple of days” at a critical moment and ends up spending the next 6 months fighting his way back home to his family. Along the way, through plague-ravaged landscapes and war-torn continents (even a long stint on a Navy submarine), he works to answer the two most critical questions: where did Kongoli (this book’s version of COVID) come from? And, more importantly, how do we stop it?
Fair warning, there is an awful lot of science in this story, skating on the very edges of “too much”. But it is understandably rendered and well within context of the story being told. In between the action, the history of viruses on earth and our tenuous coexistence with them becomes alarmingly clear.
“Civilization can take us so far away from our true natures that we never know who we really are,” is one of the lines that struck me powerfully (the other one would give away the ending, so I won’t relate it here). And as civilization drops away, the characters are all learning who they really are. There is Henry himself, who suffers from a deformed spine and truckloads of guilt for past actions. And Henry’s close friend, a doctor who is also a Saudi prince, waging his own battle to prevent the inevitable conflagration of the Middle East. Also a savvy political operative with an ax to grind with Russia. And Henry’s wife and two children who bear witness to the worst a disintegrating society can dish out. All are brave and flawed at the same time, learning who they really are and what they are truly capable of–and what not.
In short, The End of October is a starkly realistic and riveting depiction of the fragility of life and civilization itself. A breathtaking scenario of our undoing that might be closer than we imagine and should, if nothing else, make us think twice about how we live on this earth.