Halfway through this book I had to check the publication date to confirm that it was written in 2015 - not within the past two years. Because, you see, the plot revolves around a flu pandemic. Oh, there are plenty of other themes in the book, mostly about human nature on the personal level and the societal level. But the backdrop is a flu pandemic, in some respects like the one we've been enduring and in other respects very different.

Our hero, Joe Haak, drives as far from the London financial district as he can after a software program he designed predicts the end of the world economy, and along the way loses millions of dollars for his employer. He stops when he arrives in St. Piran, Cornwall, because, as Joe says, if he had driven any further, his tires would be wet.

The same morning Joe is found naked on the beach in St. Piran, a whale is seen in the harbor and the next day becomes stranded (temporarily) on the same beach. Joe's life becomes intertwined with the 303 residents of St. Piran, and with the whale, as influenza spreads around the globe and an oil crisis develops in the Gulf of Hormuz. Will this tiny, isolated village stay safe from the flu and be able to survive as food deliveries, power and communications cease?

The blurbs about this book consistently mention that it is positive and uplifting, and although that's not usually my genre, I was charmed by the authorial voice from the first page. Ironmonger has a gift for telling a tale, as evidenced by the opening paragraph:

"It was Charity Cloke who saw him first. She was just seventeen then, so fresh of complexion that her cheeks shone like clover honey. They would say in St. Piran that she was 'late to blossom', but a summer of soft Cornish sunshine and warm Atlantic winds had swept away any lingering trace of adolescent spots, and scowls, and rolls of baby flesh, and the girl who took to the beach with her dog on that October morning (or was it perhaps September?) was truly a girl no longer. 'Trees that are late to blossom,' Martha Fishburne would say, 'often blossom best.' And Martha was a teacher, so she would know."

It was encouraging to read of a scenario in which a pandemic comes to a full stop and people emerge enriched, better human beings than they were before. A question that flows through the book is whether people will turn vicious to protect their food or other resources, or to steal them from others. For the most part that's not the case in this book, but I have to confess that I wonder whether the same outcome could have been successfully imagined for the U.S. in 2021. The society is less homogenous than St. Piran's, and with easy access to automatic weapons, would Americans reach a tipping point so quickly that disaster would be inevitable?

That's a quibble. It's a well-written, engaging book that I can recommend to anyone who enjoys being swept up with a story. And the narration is beyond perfect, capturing the author's tone consistently. ( )

This novel is quite different from any other dystopian novel I have ever read. My hat is off to John Ironmonger for seeing both the possibilities and frailties of technology and of people. While reading, I was immersed in the plot and characters, and swept up into what seemed like far too likely a scenario given our recent experiences with COVID and supply chain difficulties. In fact, since this book was published in 2015, before COVID reared its ugly head, I am hoping that some of the other elements at work here don’t prove to be just as true. Ah, but then there are those parts of his imagined world that we hope and pray and need to be right.

This book is packed with little wisdoms and observations, from the way shorting manipulates our stock markets and makes rich people of rash speculators and fools of solid investors, to the way every part of our world and life is connected to other, remote, pieces that we don’t even know exist. There are really not any enclaves that aren’t affected by the outside anymore.

You’re a mathematician. You know what happens to complex systems. Sudden, dramatic, catastrophic collapse.’ His words hung over the table. ‘Have you ever heard it said that our society is only three square meals away from anarchy?’

Ideas like this one seem far more likely to be true today than they did even a few years ago. We weren’t really left without any toilet paper, but it was apparent to me that almost everyone believed we could be. And, their first instinct seemed to be “as long as I have some, it doesn’t matter who else doesn’t.” Take away “toilet paper” and substitute “food” or “water” and the threat becomes frightening.

What struck me was that what happens in the entirety of this book is that people make good or bad decisions, and those decisions influence everything in life, even things that are far outside their vision.

‘Most of life,’ Jeremy would say, ‘is like driving on a motorway. We have no choice but to keep moving forward. The only control we have is over the speed of travel. But every now and then we pass an exit. We have just an instant to decide. Stay on the highway and nothing will change. Or turn off and find yourself in an unfamiliar town.

Sometimes all we can hope for is that an exit shows itself and that we have the wisdom, or just the courage, to take it.

The world has survived pandemics before, the plague, the flu epidemic of 1918. We’ve all heard about them. But whether we continue to do so might depend on us, on who we are, on how we behave.

‘It won’t be the disease that kills us. It will be the fear. In 1918 it took people a long time to understand what was going on. They still went to work. They got on with their lives. This time we’ll all be watching it on the news channels. We’ll watch the first victims die. We’ll see the bodies being buried. We’ll panic. We’ll do the thing that everyone does, we’ll look after ourselves. Our families. We’ll shut our doors and windows, we’ll keep the children inside, we’ll stay away from work, but even that won’t finish us. Not in itself. What will finish us will be the loss of just a few, a precious few, vital individuals. Critical engineers at the power stations. Truck drivers. Oil refinery workers. People who offload gas from the great tankers. If people are too sick or too scared to go to work, then collapse will follow with frightening speed.

This book left me with hope that this final quotation won’t ever prove to be the truth of who we are. Perhaps if it ever is, we will deserve the annihilation that follows.

A big thanks to Candi for putting this book on my radar. I bought it immediately, and it has taken me two years to get to it. When will I learn? ( )

I got this book from the library at the end of last year and I liked it so much that I bought a copy today so I can read it again.

I chose this book primarily because it has a whale in it, and secondly because it's set in Cornwall. Thirdly, the plot sounded fun.

I loved everything about it. The plot unfolded at a great pace, Cornwall was depicted perfectly, and I loved the characters. Never has a book about the end of the world been so entertaining. Best book I have read in a long time. ( )

Charming. Very timely to read during the 2020 pandemic. ( )

Reading this was like opening a Christmas present you fear is going to be another pair of socks, but which turns out to be exactly what you wanted, cunningly disguised as a pair of socks. You have to give it time - more time than I would normally want to give a book - but what initially looks to be a potentially nauseating tale of community spirit in lovely close-knit communities trumping the self-interest of evil big cities builds into something much bigger. And yes, I think that community vs self-interest comparison was still the main point of the book, but the point is made with such intelligence, and using such big ideas that I ceased to be nauseated by it. There is thorough research here, which lends it an authoritative voice, and a determination to depict a scenario many other authors have tackled, but to do it in a different way. ( )