Art Anticipates Life: Lawrence Wright’s pandemic thriller

Along with the potted history lessons bringing readers up to speed on, variously, the 1918 influenza epidemic, vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner, and superpower biological-warfare research during the Cold War, some of this material would be a serious drag on the narrative’s momentum if Wright didn’t have an audience newly eager for every informational nugget he’s assembled. [...]the Muslim cabbie who took him there has blithely flown to Mecca to perform the hajj, cheek by jowl with three million other believers from all over the world. Since we know he’s infected, even though he doesn’t, the poor dude’s excitement at being among the lucky pilgrims who manage to kiss the sacred stone embedded in the Kaaba—the Great Mosque’s holiest structure—is one of the book’s most ingeniously managed chills. [...]we go from turning pages in the witless but breathless expectation that he can tell us what our world will look like next month or next year to feeling irritated when the narrative veers onto doomsday turf that seems wildly at variance (so far!) with what we’re actually going through. Whenever his educated guesswork jars with the newly observable truth outside our window, it’s as if we were reading Morgan Robertson’s The Wreck of the Titan—the 1898 novella that famously predicted the Titanic’s sinking—while aboard the real ship, enjoying the grim luxury of looking up occasionally to mutter, “Well, you sure got that bit wrong, Jack” as deck chairs skitter, lifeboats lower away, the cold turns bitter, and Kate and Leo feel conspicuous in their absence.