Flashes of Panic

This morning I finished reading The Last Town on Earth after starting it on Friday, probably the quickest I’ve read a novel in recent years (excepting times when I’ve been sitting on planes and have read multiple books straight through, sometimes without benefit of bookmarks).

I don’t know how much attention this book got when it was new and I don’t know if everyone else has read it; I do know that I bought it at a used bookstore in my hometown while shopping for plane reading (obviously, I overstocked) because Nicole brought it over to me, pointing to one of the short excerpts of newspaper reviews on the back and saying, “See that? That was me.”

I’d read a relatively dry history book about the first World War last winter, and I appreciated this quite different approach tremendously. Since I finished it, I’ve read several online reviews faulting the author’s writing style, but I didn’t really notice that. What I did enjoy greatly was the premise: during the 1918 flu pandemic, an event curiously under-discussed in our national histories, a town attempts to protect itself by imposing a reverse quarantine: nobody goes in or out, to keep the flu out. It sound like a grand idea, but like all abstract policies it really gets interesting when they have to actually put the concept into practice.

So many of the conflicts which come into play have echoes in today’s world: capital vs. labor, isolationism vs. engagement, pacifism vs. militarism, civil rights vs. fear and power, or when an individual’s duty to family, community, country or humanity conflict with each other.

The author doesn’t have an axe to grind or a message to preach (although I can see from the way I’ve phrased the list above that perhaps I do); he creates characters who are human, gives them principles (or at least motivations) and puts them in positions where they’re forced to act on that basis. It was an interesting experiment, and I think made interesting reading for that reason alone.

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