structurally excellent, epidemiologically silly

best-built novel i read last year and the epidemiology is a joke, so both.

structure first. it moves between the night arthur leander dies on stage, the weeks of the collapse, and year twenty with the travelling symphony, and the joins are made by objects rather than by chapters announcing a jump. a glass paperweight. a comic almost nobody has read. a snow globe. you can track the objects and get a second, quieter plot for free. i did that on a second pass with a pen, and it holds: every hand-off is placed, nothing turns up by convenience.

the museum of civilisation in the airport is the best idea here. it isn't a survival plot, it's a curation plot. someone deciding what is worth keeping, and putting the passports and the phones and the motorbike behind glass. much more interesting than another scavenging novel.

now the flu. a pathogen with a kill rate that high and an onset that fast burns out before it saturates, and this one is given both, plus global spread inside about two days of narrated time. i don't need a model in an appendix. one line acknowledging that the thing had to travel would have done it.

then the twenty years after, where nobody does arithmetic. no smelting, no seed stock, no salt, no discussion of where the horses' winter feed comes from in michigan, tinned food lasting roughly a decade past when it would. the single attempt at electricity is treated as a marvel rather than the first thing a few hundred surviving engineers would organise.

8 anyway, because the book isn't trying to be a systems novel and i knew that by chapter three. it's about what art is for when the audience infrastructure is gone, and the shakespeare-in-the-ruins conceit should be unbearable and isn't, mostly because the symphony argue about it constantly and a third of them think it's stupid.

kirsten works. jeevan works, and his stretch in the flat with the shopping is the only part of the collapse written at ground level, hour by hour. the prophet strand is the weakest thread and i think it exists to give year twenty a threat it didn't need.

read it on a work trip in two sittings. bought a second copy for a colleague who then argued with me for an hour about the mortality rate, so at least i'm not alone in that.

no index. i'd have read one.