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It is quite difficult to choose some words to begin this review. Let’s say that the novel gripped me with its fast pace. An almost cinema-like dynamism – the descent of civilization into chaos, through a combination of visceral panic and despair, spred like a fire, devouring everything around – and a fire it was, as the onset of Scarlet Plague brought forth the innate instincts of self-destruction – murder, looting, arson. For, if once the unexpected symptoms appear, it takes the microbes only hald an hour to turn a healthy man into rotting corpse, people seek either salvation – fruitless endeavors, as it turned – or accept their fate and set the world ablaze as a final act of will.
A dystopian, magnate-ruled society of the 21st America (as it was imagined by a Belle Epoque writer) could not withstand the catastrophe. A rigid class system to be torn down, all of the intricacies of progress to be annulled by a single flash of Plague – in just a week! No wonder that the narrator, now an old, sickly man, the last alive witness of the end, recalls the events of the long ago with tears and trepidation.
Jack London imagined an absolute catastrophe, that would leave a score of people alive – deserting all knowledge of civilisation and turning to a primitive way of life within a geberation. One might consider this interpretation a little naive – but the tale nevertheless retained its strong grip on me from the first moment to the last. And it is short – no more than eighty pages.