Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
MARK O’CONNELL
(GRANTA, 272 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064
When people started panic-buying toilet rolls in response to the coronavirus outbreak, the comedian Trevor Noah offered his wry opinion. Noah, who is African, pointed out that he, and most people on the planet, have long managed to live without toilet paper; that many in the developed world go to the lavatory in the very rooms that are equipped with shower facilities; and that toilet-roll stockpiling feels like a classic example of people in the West getting their priorities wrong when faced with disaster. “What next?” Noah asked. Would shoppers besiege supermarkets desperately asking, “where is the car wax?”
Mark O’Connell’s new and very timely book highlights other instances of the muddled thinking that affects those of us in the affluent West when we contemplate civilisational collapse. Terrors such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and – most pertinently – pandemic disease have all made such a collapse appear imminent in recent years, and O’Connell works through his own anxieties about these threats by narrating his travels from suburban Dublin to various apocalyptic locations. He journeys to South Dakota to examine the gigantic bunkers which were once used for weapons storage, but which have now been repurposed as real estate for the wealthy, who will shelter there during times of calamity. He visits parts of New Zealand where American billionaires plan to arrive by private jet if the US becomes unliveable. And he travels to the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl, in the company of thrill-seeking tourists.
