how do you thik story would have ended if the sarrakos had reveled the secret to wrights?
Answers
The novel virus first emerged in east Asia. By spring, a pandemic suffuses the globe. In America, businesses shut down, airports empty, misinformation abounds. The president, a divisive figure with a tanning bed in the White House, offers baseless reassurances, and appoints the dubiously pious vice-president to lead the pandemic response. This would be a decent summary of the past two months, if it wasn’t the plot to The End of October, a new novel by Lawrence Wright, which flies thrillingly, eerily close to reality – a global outbreak of a deadly pathogen with no known cure in the kinetic, flammable information torrent of the late 2010s.
“It’s unnerving” Wright, a New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer-winning journalist, told the Guardian on the surreal fortune of releasing a global pandemic novel during a global pandemic. “It was meant to be a warning cry, when we weren’t buffeted by all this dire news. Whenever I open the paper it feels like I’m reading my own book. It’s weird.” The End of October, which Lawrence began writing in 2017 (his final draft was submitted in summer 2019), is a deeply researched scenario-play of a novel – the world faced with a 1918 Spanish flu-type pathogen – told in brisk, unsparing prose. Competence and expertise serve as its compass; Wright’s American protagonist, Dr Henry Parsons, is a cunning, emotionally clamped virologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), outrunning a shady past at a secret lab in Maryland’s Fort Detrick.
Alarmed by a mass die-off in an Indonesian political concentration camp for young gay men, Henry travels to Jakarta, where he discovers “Kongoli virus”, named after the camp, a gruesome new form of hemorrhagic influenza. Wright’s writing is clinical and unblinking – you stare into chest cavities, at lungs subsumed in fluid, at bodies turned blue by cyanosis, or lack of oxygen. The Kongoli camp is quarantined and swarmed by various health agencies that are, like Henry, veterans of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa. But when an inadvertently exposed taxi driver makes the hajj – the Islamic holy pilgrimage to Mecca – along with 3 million other people, all bets for containing the spread are off. Within days, people die en masse around the world.
The idea for a modern pandemic story originated in 2010, when film-maker Ridley Scott approached Wright to write a screenplay about the end of civilization. “In my mind, the more likely way civilization would be threatened like that would be a pandemic,” said Wright, who long admired the “really creative, intelligent” epidemiologists, microbiologists and virologists he encountered as a journalist. Though they never made the movie, “I was always interested and I thought it was a really good story,” he said. “I decided that if I was going to do it, I would have to do the research I had failed to do when I was working on it as a script.”
Explanation:
ANSWER
My son never saw the skeleton in the cupboard. But, he played a small part in the events that followed its discovery. My son was fifteen that year, and he was back in his boarding school in Simla after spending the long winter holidays in Dehradun. I was still managing the old Green's hotel in Dehra, a hotel that was soon to disappear and become part of Dehra's unrecorded history. It was called Green's not because it purported to the spread of any greenery (its neglected garden was chocked with lantana), but because it had been started by an Englishman, Mr. Green, back in 1920, just after the Great War had ended in Europe. Mr Green had died at the outset of the Second World War. He had just sold the hotel and was on his way back to England when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a German submarine. Mr Green went down with the ship.
The hotel had already been in decline, and the new owner, a Sikh businessman from Ludhiana, had done his best to keep it going.
But post-War and post-Independence, Dehra was going through a lean period. My husband's motor workshop was also going through a lean period - a crisis, in fact - and I was glad to take the job of running the small hotel while he took a job in Delhi.
I wrote to my son about once a month, giving him news of the hotel, some of its more interesting guests, the pictures that were showing in town.