My favorite books where a catastrophe makes society fall apart

I was first struck by the elegance of this book, its seamless ease in which it moves between time and place, its weird, ghostly beauty, and unsettling nature.

It’s post-apocalyptic but at the same time enchanting. Where else could a troupe of Shakespearean actors and musicians travel in horse-drawn pickup trucks in a post-civilisation dreamscape? I was held all the way through by its understated charm and mystery.

Station Eleven is a welcome change from the usual wail and woe of plague stories.

Camus’ Stranger brought me to this book and I was once more pulled in by the same direct prose, the same detachment and the same philosophical inquisitiveness.

There’s a feeling that plagues are inevitable, that they will come no matter what we do, and that our efforts to stop them always degenerate into the absurd. But what struck me most was that this is not fatalism, because although the collective effort is largely useless, hope lies in the small acts of kindness between individuals.

Spare, grim, and minimalist. This is the kind of book I really like, a giant middle finger to the nice, safe suburban sensibilities.

With this disease, which kills all grasses and thus the basic food supply, the thin civilisational veneer is smashed to bits quickly and the England of tea, warm beer, and cricket on the village green is replaced with mass starvation, rapists, murderers, jungle law, atom bombs, and a Hobbesian all-against-all.

This is a story and writing gripping and direct that makes you square up to the fact that you would very likely set aside the moral for the necessary. And it forces you to ask the question: would you kill to save your family? 

I’ve always preferred those stories of great global catastrophes that remain in a single small location.

In the case of Alas, Babylon the small town of Fort Repose survives the nuclear holocaust because it’s small. Written at the height of the cold war when there were several and very real moments of brinkmanship between the Soviets and Americans. 

It’s a great read for another reason: this is a well-informed writer. For instance, here we find that salt is as vital for survival as water? And what good is a doctor if he has no medicine? These are things this little community has to face, but the author is hopeful.

This is one of those books that is a lens into a period in time but is at the same time easily readable and to the point. How Fort Repose deals with nuclear Armageddon is the same story of how all people deal with existential crises, the best they can.

I enjoyed reading this book both as a historical artefact of the 17th century but also because Defoe’s plain, matter-of-fact style makes all the chaos, the shrieking, the death carts, families locked in their houses, health certificates, the delirium, the fear of coming too close, the paranoia, the panic and the madness that surrounds the narrator all the more disturbing.

He is a witness whose curiosity far outweighs his fear. But there’s also the Defoe-like sense of adventure when for instance a group of three escape London and shift for themselves in a countryside whose towns and villages are hostile to strangers. Instructive, disquieting, gripping, indelible.

This retained its curiosity value even on a second reading. A great little book.