It’s worth questioning whether a book about COVID-19 is really what the world needs right now. After a year of obsessive consideration, discussion and reconsideration of the finer points of epidemiology, I, for one, am a little weary of the whole subject. Almost any account of the last fourteen months of our lives would be an exhausting restatement of established knowledge. For all the historical significance of the present moment, I would be surprised if many popular books about the pandemic were released in the next few years. Who really wants to be reminded?
Rather than answering this question directly, Lewis changes the subject. Sure, we all know the story of how the pandemic happened - the early warning signs, the complacency, the whiplash of those early lockdowns - but do we really know why it all happened? Why were we so unprepared? Why did some countries do so much better than others? What didn’t happen that should have? It’s in answering these questions that Lewis manages to offer a truly revelatory backstory to this pandemic.
In 2005, George W. Bush was on summer vacation when he read The Great Influenza, John Barry’s now-famous account of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Newly scarred by his own inept response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush was hypersensitive to the prospect of unexpected natural disasters. In what might have been the one redeeming legacy of his presidency, Bush set up a team of seven experts to develop America’s response strategy for global pandemics. The Premonition, in a nutshell, is the story of this team, how it came together, why it was ignored, and what might have been had things gone differently.
In that regard, The Premonition has obvious ties to Lewis’s earlier work, The Big Short: A rag-tag team of well-educated eccentrics, mostly white men, act as Cassandras to an oncoming crisis. But the sense of inevitability that pervades The Big Short is absent here. The figures in The Premonition are not rogue speculators on the fringes of the derivatives market but scientists and bureaucrats operating at the highest levels of government. Time and time again we are given the sense that if just one more person had listened and taken the threat of communicable disease more seriously, countless deaths would have been avoided. The resulting tragedy is all the more powerful for having been so contingent.
That same sense of contingency also makes The Premonition a vivid illustration of how the world works. The book has no fundamental thesis statement beyond the premise that the pandemic was avoidable, but by walking us through each step on the road to disaster, and showing us why each step mattered, Lewis leaves the attentive reader with a smorgasbord of insights and observations. To give a sample of the lessons on offer, here are some of my own key take-aways from the book:
· Academic credentials can grant outsiders access to the establishment
· Large institutions have a strong tendency towards stagnation and dysfunction
· These tendencies are not inevitable or irreversible
· It is possible to make a meaningful difference within a dysfunctional system
· Communications technology is invaluable for connecting transgressive thinkers
· The problems you expect are not the problems you get
· Scientific research has an important part to play in future social progress
· It matters a lot who is president of the United States
· There is no reputationally safe way to raise the alarm about a small problem which is getting exponentially worse
Even if you’re not that interested in developing your own theories of society, this book is worth buying for its sheer entertainment value. Lewis specializes in finding compelling figures sitting just adjacent to the levers of power in society, and this book is no exception to that pattern. In fact, if there is any criticism to be made of the book, it’s that Lewis’s characters are so compelling that other perspectives are crowded out. As Jennifer Szalai has written for the New York Times,
This method of hewing so tightly to his characters’ perspectives gives Lewis’s narrative its undeniable propulsion, but it also comes at a cost. He doesn’t supply any endnotes, or even a sense of how many people he talked to. His main characters are presented to us as they would undoubtedly like to appear: charmingly obsessive, unwaveringly principled and unfailingly right.
But unless you are keenly interested in conducting the most rigorous possible autopsy on the pandemic, this critique will likely read as praising with faint damnation. The bottom line is that The Premonition is a gripping portrait of the people and power structures that have shaped the last year of our lives. If in painting this portrait Lewis draws his lines a little too sharply and presents too stark a contrast between those on the right and wrong sides of history, the end result is still a striking sight to behold.