Reading about the world coming to a halt is way better than the reality
My social media feeds have recently reminded me of photos I took and things I posted online four years ago in the first few weeks of lockdown after the world came shuddering to a halt.
I had a different view to most other people — I was still going to work in RTÉ every day, driving through checkpoints and abandoned streets, broadcasting from an almost empty building. I stopped one Saturday morning in Donnybrook village and stood in the middle of the road for a while just to take pictures. I described it to friends later as being like 28 Days Later without the zombies.
In the beginning, I had been late to the panic, hoping that we could just head down to The Winchester for a pint until it would all blow over. Even when people started whispering of where a new batch of toilet rolls would soon be delivered as if it were the third secret of Fatima, something inside me refused to believe that I was going to have to face an eventuality I had been reading about in fiction since I was a kid.
A couple of days before actual lockdown began, I started to panic. Every media outlet was talking about masks and hand sanitiser, so coming home from work one afternoon, I knew I needed to find enough to get us through this. Our lives depended on it. A few hours later I arrived home triumphant to my wife — in one last shop I had found two builders’ dust masks and a couple of packets of moisturising hand and body wipes. “Hallelujah,” my wife said, “we are surely saved!” Hunter-gatherer I am not.
As lockdown stretched on, we played “which level are we at this week?” bingo and I found a strange kind of comfort in some fictional Armageddons where, at the very least, I knew how the story was going to end. They might be useful for us all next time around.
I couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 when I discovered my very first end of the world — Douglas Adams’ extraordinary The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It doesn’t do things by halves; the entire Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route in the first 30 pages.
I read it after watching the TV series and my world was never the same. It’s one of only a few wry, witty comedies about what happens when mankind’s civilisation ceases to exist.
Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham has never been adapted well (there’s even a happy ending to the 1963 film version!) but the book itself is fantastic. “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere” is my favourite opening of any post-apocalyptic fiction. A man wakes up in a hospital bed to realise that, while he was unconscious, the world halted around him. It’s eerily calm and practical about what happens to characters when they have to fight back and make a new world in one now populated by plants that can blind and kill you.
Richard Matheson’s I am Legend has been better adapted over the years (the Will Smith version, while loosely based, is well worth the watch). After a terrible war, one man is barricaded in his home against what can only be described as vampires (they avoid the daylight). He’s under siege at night, the city is empty by day. It’s a study of loneliness, encroaching mental breakdown, and alcoholism. What could have been slow or dull is heart-stoppingly dramatic in places.
Lastly, a novel I only read a few weeks ago (this will be the first of many apologies to my wife as she has been badgering me to read it). In Jacqueline Harpmann’s I Who Have Never Known Men (translated by Ros Schwartz) 39 women and a young girl are being held captive underground by male guards who never speak. They don’t remember how they got there. One day a siren goes off, the guards run, and the women come up into a world they don’t recognise. It’s wonderfully unique in that, after they escape, there are no threats. Food is plentiful, they have shelter, there is no-one or nothing threatening them. So, what happens then? It’s brilliant. Finally, a quick mention that the second annual Granard Booktown Festival is taking place this weekend. It’s Ireland’s brightest and best new gathering of readers and writers and there’s still loads of time for you to see Paul Lynch, Patricia Gibney, Anne Griffin, Fergal Keane, Patrick DeWitt, and a live recording of the Black and Irish podcast.
⬤ For more, visit granardbooktown festival.ie