Alas, Babylon (Book Review)

Full spoilers for the entire book below. Proceed with caution.

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Title: Alas, Babylon
Author: Pat Frank
Publication Date: 1959 (novel), 2010 (audio)
Publisher: J. B. Lippincott (novel) and Audible, Inc. (audio)
Narrated By: Will Patton
Recording time: 11 hrs and 11 mins

THE PLOT

via wiki

The novel starts in early December of an unspecified year in the early 1960s; the Soviet Union has just launched Sputnik 23. Tensions have been escalating for two years between the United States and the Soviet Union for dominance in the Middle East and in the Mediterranean Sea. The Soviets are menacing Turkey from three sides through their proxies in Egypt, Syria and Iraq in order to gain control of the Bosporus and give free passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to their large Mediterranean naval fleet. To counteract the Soviet threat, the United States established a military presence in Lebanon and is providing aid to their Turkish and Israeli allies. Meanwhile, the Soviets gained a temporary space supremacy through the launch of a fleet of militarized Sputniks; moreover, they are aware that, within three or four years, the United States will cover the gap. Intelligence from a Soviet officer who defected in Berlin provided information about a Soviet war plan involving a sudden, overwhelming nuclear first strike on U.S. and NATO military and civilian targets, in order to minimize retaliation and to ensure that the Soviet Union becomes the leading world power. According to the leaked war plan, the Soviet leadership considers acceptable the loss of 20 to 30 million of their own civilian population due to an anticipated retaliatory strike by NATO.

Randy Bragg, a failed political candidate and an attorney who occasionally practices law, lives an otherwise aimless life in the small Central Florida town of Fort Repose. The younger bachelor son of a prominent local family, his ancestors founded Fort Repose in the 1800s. Randy’s older brother, Colonel Mark Bragg, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer at Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, sends a telegram to Randy ending in the words, “Alas, Babylon”, a pre-established code between the brothers to warn of imminent disaster. Shortly thereafter, Mark flies his family down to Orlando in order to stay with Randy at Fort Repose for their protection while Mark remains at SAC headquarters.

Soon afterwards, a carrier-based U.S. Navy fighter pilot, attempting to intercept a Soviet plane over the Mediterranean, inadvertently destroys an ammunition depot at a large Soviet submarine base in Latakia, Syria. The explosion is mistaken for a large-scale U.S. air assault on the military facility and, by the following day, the Soviet Union retaliates with its planned full-scale nuclear strike against the United States and its allies. With Mark as a witness, U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles are launched at the Soviet Union in retaliation. Randy and his guests awake to the shaking from the nuclear missile attacks on nearby military bases such as McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando and Naval Air Station Sanford; one explosion temporarily blinds Peyton, Randy’s niece. The residents of Fort Repose later observe other mushroom clouds to the southwest and northeast, implying that MacDill Air Force Base and the city of Tampa as well as the city of Jacksonville and its multiple U.S. naval installations have also been destroyed.

Following what is simply referred to as “The Day”, Fort Repose descends into chaos: tourists are trapped in their hotels, communication lines fail, the CONELRAD radio system barely operates, convicts escape from prisons, and a run on the banks makes currency worthless. In the weeks and months after the attack, sporadic news gathered through an old but still-functioning vacuum tube radio receiver show that many major cities of the U.S. are in ruins and vast regions of the Continental United States are labeled by the government as off-limits “contaminated zones.” Because of the numerous U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy installations from one end of the state to the other that were struck during the Soviet attack, Florida is among the contaminated areas, leaving the stranded survivors of Fort Repose without hope of immediate assistance. Most of the U.S. government has been eliminated, with the U.S. presidency defaulting to Josephine Vanbruuker-Brown, the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare who is believed to be leading the nation from a location in Colorado.

Other international broadcasts, heard over the shortwave radio of Randy’s neighbor, retired Navy Rear Admiral Sam Hazzard, reveal that Western Europe was badly hit by Soviet missiles as well, mentioning a dire situation in southern France. Soviet leadership was eliminated by the U.S. retaliation and the Soviet capital was moved to Central Asia, but war still rages for months after the attack, although it is fought mostly between the remnants of the U.S. Air Force and scattered Soviet Navy nuclear submarines.

A Korean War veteran still serving as a U.S. Army Reserve infantry officer before the Soviet attack, Randy learns in a radio dispatch by President Vanbruuker-Brown that she has directed any surviving active duty or reserve U.S. military officers to form local militias to keep the peace domestically. This formally empowers Randy as the local authority under the current emergency situation. He then organizes a community self-defense force against bandits and tries to rid the community of radioactive jewelry brought into Fort Repose from the radioactive ruins of Miami. The search for alternative food sources is also prominent in the months following the attack, leading to the launch of a rag-tag fleet of fishing boats to sift the surrounding lakes, rivers and swamps for fish and to a desperate search for much-needed salt.

The following year, an Air Force helicopter arrives at Fort Repose. The crew assesses the status of the residents and the local environment, explaining that the area around Fort Repose is perhaps the largest patch of non-contaminated soil in Florida and that, after everything they have suffered, the survivors of Fort Repose managed to fare better than many other places in the US. Randy also learns that his brother, Mark, most likely died when Omaha and Offutt Air Force Base were destroyed by multiple Soviet nuclear missile strikes. When the crew of the helicopter offer to evacuate the residents out of Florida, the residents choose to stay.

It is eventually revealed that the United States formally won the war, but at a tremendous cost: the country lost almost 75% of its population. (Fewer than 45 million survivors are estimated overall; the population of the U.S. in the early 1960s had been approximately 180 million.) As well, the country lost most of its military, its infrastructure, and most of its natural resources—ironically, the U.S. government is planning to use the large stockpiles of military-grade uranium and plutonium left from the war to power the surviving towns and cities with nuclear reactors. The U.S. is now receiving food, fuel and medicine aid from third-world countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and Venezuela. According to a radio broadcast, the “Three Greats,” India, China and Japan, have taken the role of the world’s leading powers in place of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The book ends by saying that things will not return to normal for 1,000 years and that Randy “…turned to face the thousand-year night.”

My Review:

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank was one of the earliest and most-popular post-Apocalypse dystopian novels of the 20th century. In my opinion it remains one of the best of that genre. The story takes a very serious and relatively detailed look at how a rural community might survive a nuclear Holocaust using a combination of luck, their existing community-wide knowledge and resources, and a persevering spirit. The book is a commentary on the pros and cons of a modern technologically advanced society, from the perspective of having lost it. It’s also a commentary on race relations in an environment wherein differences of skin color matter a lot less than banning together to survive. Beyond all of that, though, it’s an emotional story about love, loss, and human behavior under circumstances of crisis.

Film actor Will Patton is the audiobook narrator and I thought he did a fantastic job. I thought he hit all the right emotional notes throughout the story in his characteristic not-too-thick southern drawl. The book is a relatively quick listen and I never felt as though the plot dragged. (I actually got through the entire book in less than a day because I didn’t want to put it down.)

The book title is a paraphrase from the Book of Revelation 18:10:

“Alas! Alas! You great city, you mighty city, Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come.”

There have been theologians who have wondered since the time that the United States became a global power if the USA is the Babylon referred to here in the Bible. If you red the entirety of Revelation 18, you could certainly draw comparisons that seem to fit between the Babylon described and America. However, Pat Frank never really approaches this book from that angle. The survivors re-embrace religion, and that is treated as a positive, but the conversation of the text never spends any time on the potential perceived wickedness of the country, or on that idea that the nuclear war was a judgment from God. The title invites that speculation but I preferred that this was not the focus overtly, at least in terms of sin. We are invited to judge the modern finance system, and our love and reliance on far-away production. But in the sense of there being a judgment, it is not applied specifically to America, or to Russia (who was also wiped out within the story.) Frank to some degree implies that everyone from the “first world” is part of Babylon. I think you could read this book anywhere on earth, imagine something like it happening where you live, and find the plot and characters relatable.

To the extent there is a focus backward regarding judgment, it’s more about warfare, human nature, and the way that bureaucracy can hinder wisdom from prevailing. It wasn’t that people were overtly evil, but rather that there was nobody truly in charge to tell everyone to stop.

I thought the parts of the story that brought up the negative aspects of (for them) past technology were the most interesting. The town doctor notes that the changed diet and all of the work and walking seems to have improved community health in some respects. Multiple characters – most notably the primary protagonist Randy Bragg – become much better versions of themselves in an environment where everyone has to pull together to survive. Randy goes from something of a failed politician and lay-about to the de facto leader of the entire region, driven by latent training he picked up in the Korean War and his innate good character. His (eventual) father-in-law goes from a retired man with nothing to do, waiting to die, to a man with knowledge and skills that are useful again. The environment of so much need drives everyone to find a fulfilling purpose. By the time the U.S. government is restored enough around the country to check on the novel’s community in Fort Repose, Florida, you get a sense that the locals would be better off and happier left alone. The characters seem to realize that, too, though they do desire some outside provisions that they haven’t figured out how to address locally yet (such as reading glasses.)

For the most part, the nuclear war backdrop is just that… a backdrop. This is a story about modernism and society. You walk away from the novel wondering if perhaps humans should have stopped advancing, technologically, in the late 19th or early 20th century. I think Frank could have come up with some other pretext for a civilizational reset and written largely the same story, with the same heart. His message seems to be that the trade-off of modern comfort and safety might come at too high a price. Too much comfort is bad for people, robbing them of the work and purpose that feeds human dignity. This resonates even more loudly in the 21st century where we are even farther removed from knowing how to live off the land. It’s hard not to finish the novel and think that everyone would be better off living in small communities, with lesser technology, like the one in Fort Repose.

Maybe the American Amish and Weird Al have it right.

The race relations element of the story is a key point throughout. The black Henry family plays a pivotal role in everyone’s survival. As the novel progresses, the fact that they are black plays an increasingly smaller role within the Fort Repose community – except to the extent that they use the prejudice of outsiders to their own advantage. This plays out tragically in the town’s victory over the Highway Men, a band of roads-based violent thieves encroaching closer and closer toward the town. When it is decided that dealing with these bandits is necessary, Malachi Henry – who is black – is chosen to drive the truck that is intended to lure the bandits into an ambush. Malachi volunteers and the others agree with him, because they all believe that the Highway Men would view him as a softer target on account of his skin color. He is, essentially, bait. The plan works and the Outlaws are all killed, however, Malachi dies in the confrontation. He is mourned community-wide as a hero after his passing. (This messaging was particularly significant at the time the novel was published in 1959, because the Civil Rights Movement was on-going and fiercely so at this time.) Frank could have been really ham-fisted and preachy in his approach to this issue, but instead he was subtle, focused on realism and individual character-building. He didn’t have to proverbially shout that racism was bad because doing so wasn’t necessary. Simply showing us the Henry family made it obvious.

One of the complaints I’ve read about this book, from others, is that it feels a bit emotionally wooden. That was not my experience. Will Patton’s narration helped to instead project a story that was emotional, but subtly so. I once heard another actor – Michael Caine – explain in an interview that when acting out grief, it is his job not to cry, but to fight back tears. This book felt like it was doing just that. In a post-apocalyptic story, the survivors are all clearly feeling deep and intense emotions, but the circumstances are dictating that they keep a tight reign on those feelings. The characters who were unable to do so – such as Edgar Quisenberry the bank manager whose job was rendered pointless in a bartering society – don’t make it. For me, this approach to the story’s emotions was effective.

Overall, I really enjoyed the novel, Will Patton’s audiobook narration in particular, and I recommend it without reservation.

Have you read Alas, Babylon? If so, what did you think?