Lawrence Wright's new book ‘The End of October’ imagines a global plague worse than what we are facing now. Read how the novel predicted the pandemic
Then, a few years ago, Scott called back: “He was like, ‘I don’t know why the fuck we never made that picture.’ He wanted to know if I would be interested in looking at it again.” When Wright did, he realized that he wanted to write it as a novel, which would follow a microbe hunter named Henry Parsons as he attempts to track down the source of — and find the cure for — a novel virus that’s wiping out humanity. Panic proliferates. Disruption abounds.
Absolutely. When I started working on [the book], I realized that my imagination as a novelist was not equivalent to the anxiety these people had. It was not an “if this happens.” They all, for the most part, felt that, “This is going to happen. We just have to be prepared for it, and we’re not.” And there was a fair degree of anger on their part.
Well, I was fascinated by that, because that flu killed more Americans than have died in all of our wars of the 20th century: World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — 675,000 Americans. My dad was three years old, and he and his parents all got it in central Kansas. The average lifespan of an American in 1917 was something like 55 years. In 1918, it had dropped to 39. It’s a scar on history that has left a deep mark, but immediately afterward, nobody talked about it.
Since the beginning of civilization, we’ve been struggling with this. We’re constantly finding that people are acting against their own interests, and there’s a struggle between savagery and civilization. That’s certainly something I studied when I was working on terrorism. There are these strong urges that are competing all the time for control of our civilization.Well, I think that we always have the possibility of renewal, and moments of great tragedy are opportunities to reset.
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