Reading for a Pandemic: Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers
While much of the world’s economy is struggling to deal with our ‘new normal’, some novelists are all likely spending their days in splendid isolation while producing the latest magnum opus in pandemic literature. There’ll be the science and history books of course (bonus points if featuring a reference to the Spanish Flu), the thrillers, the zombie horrors, the lockdown romances and lockdown erotica, even children’s books to help explain what is happening for youngsters separated from their friends, class mates, and school work. Some of these will have been around for years, some will have been dashed off once it became clear this wasn’t just another bird flu episode like we get every couple of years – SARS, MERS etc. Being topical is profitable. But it’s tough to be in the right place at the right time.
The pandemic sub-genre isn’t new of course. Boccaccio’s The Decameron – written over six centuries ago – had already locked up a group of story-tellers from the Black Death where they whiled away their time telling daily yarns a la The Canterbury Tales. Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year (1722) recounts life in London in 1655, eleven years before the Great Fire offered the Boris Johnsons of their day a blank canvas on which to rebuild the city. Edgar Allan Poe’s Prince Prospero locked himself away from plague in The Mask of the Red Death. Look to more modern titles and a list of writers as varied as literary heroes like Albert Camus (The Plague), Jose Saramago (Blindness), Cormac McCarthy (The Road) have rubbed shoulders (not literally – keep your distance) with genre heroes like Stephen King and errr… Dean Koontz (okay, it’s not all good reading) who have all tackled the topic. These stories often end up focusing more on what comes in the aftermath such as in McCarthy’s The Road or Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven as what came before. Plenty to read during the lockdown then. No need to fret too much over the real-life numbers, flat-earthers or conniving politicians. There isn’t much, after all, that you or I can do without it anyway.
While some genre writers got to the party way early – Koontz’s reference to a virus originating in Wuhan got some on Reddit rather excited, it was King’s Captain Trips virus which sets off The Stand which had more longevity (the mini-series that completed production this March won’t have harmed the topicality either). There was even a tongue in cheek apology from the great man himself for the state of 2020 in between tweets lambasting President Donald Trump and Maine Senator and serial cause of disappointment Susan Collins. So King has you sorted. But if you prefer your apocalyptic fiction with less on the nose descriptions of the battle between good and evil (than King), then perhaps Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers might suit you.
It all starts with a mix of the celestial (a comet) and the mundane (a teenager’s empty bed). Before too long there’s a collection of sleepwalkers traversing through the American heartland for places unknown – accompanied by family, friends, the CDC and Homeland Security. Such a narrative isn’t going to sustain itself with one point of view over 800 pages though, and Wendig has populated his collapsing America with a doubting preacher, an Irish rock star who definitely isn’t anything like Bono, and a right wing hate-group fresh from their latest cross burning. Not to forget the flu-like illness that is sweeping the country and may or may not have some relationship to the walkers. Other parts of the patchwork include a Trump-style presidential candidate (natch), a theme part entrepreneur and a shadowy corporation which may or may not have let something out of Pandora’s box. Wendig’s America is hopefully more a rhyme of America in 2020 than an out and out portrayal of Trumpworld, but there is plenty here to read into. Certainly an evening spent reading Wanderers will make you feel like this is a man who worries about where his country is going.
800 pages is quite the undertaking to read, let alone actually write, and Wendig’s novel is as dramatic in scope as it is in detail. Some scenes will leave you riveted and angry, some characters will be well-enough drawn to make you feel as if you are next to them. The amount of research that has gone into this work is incredible, this is a man who may know nearly has much about pandemics as (at least the students of) Anthony Fauci. Yet there are occasions where balance seems an issue – as if he is too in love with his research. Some scenes take an age to reach their point, some information seems unnecessary and even a torture. For a writer who has made his name within the Star Wars and Marvel universes, he seems almost coy about some action scenes, meaning there will probably be a significant minority of readers who will add this to their DNF pile. Things aren’t quite as bad as King, but maybe a more fastidious editor might have tempered some of his chapters. That said, more of this world would be welcome, and Wendig has left enough strands open for there to be more of it to come. Whether or not it will b enough for a Marvel or even a King-style universe is tough to say. But Wendig has created a world which is potentially intriguing here. And there will be readers for it.
