The book is a study of lives before and after the end of the world (a flu strain wipes almost everyone out in short order). There’s very little action, tension, or intrigue in this novel but it is beautifully written, observed with a gentle but penetrating eye, and made me want to keep reading.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time — from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains — this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people:
- the actor,
- the man who tried to save him,
- the actor’s first wife,
- his oldest friend, and
- a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
The book presents an unsentimental and clear-eyed portrait of what humanity considers civilization. It is a wonderful story of the resilience of people. It’s subtle, seemingly low impact, but the images it put in my head will stay with me.
I first started reading this during the early days of Covid-19, but the themes in the book hit a little too close for comfort, and paused reading this until much later. In hindsight, Covid didn’t prove as lethal as the fictional Georgia flu from the book, but humanity’s reaction — or lack thereof — was probably even worse than the one the author describes in this post-apocalyptic work.
There is now a television mini-series based on the book. The reviews for the show are mixed, but I do intend to watch it, as I really enjoyed this book.