Review: Old fashioned but enjoyable
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 11, 2012
I loved the story. I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories (plague killing the world, science scrambles to help, protagonists try to survive), esecially if they don't contain zombies. I don't mind zombies btw but I prefer the more believeable 'illness-or-natural-disaster as extinction event' yarns. This one reminded me in parts of John Wyndham's tales (that's a compliment, despite the age of those books I still enjoy them). Some of this is due to the slightly old fashioned language used; I don't think I've read a book where a person is called 'that worthy' in many years. Also the description of the female characters was very old fashioned (either beautiful and helpless with desire for the hero, a mother type, or intelligent, but wanting the love of a good man). Did this distract from the book? Perhaps a little - I found it grated somewhat in places but given that I do enjoy older novels with similar characterisations (typical of the era in which they were written) it wasn't a huge issue. Like Wyndham's novels, this book came over as a very British tale. I can't really explain it more than that, if you read it and have read Wyndham (and to some extent early James Herbert)you will know exactly what I  mean by this. I can't tell you if the science was any good - I'm not a scientist - but I found it believeable at least, and it didn't seem too far fetched as an idea. If I had any advice for the writer I would say make your heroines a bit stronger and have a few more flawed people in the tale. No-one in this is really a bad person and I think we all suspect that if the world DID suffer a huge catastrophe, at least a few people would act badly, either simply selfishly or downright psychopathically.