Countdown City by Ben H. Winters (2013)
There are a million things I might be doing other than putting in overtime to make right one Bucket List abandonment, to heal Martha Milano’s broken heart. But this is what I do. It’s what makes sense to me, what has long made sense. And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.
This is the second novel in Winters’s Last Policeman trilogy. I think you could come to this book without having read The Last Policeman itself, but I’d recommend beginning at the beginning because the beginning is good! In an alternate present, Earth is living through what might prove to be the final year of human civilisation. A ten-mile-wide asteroid, Maia, is hurtling towards our planet. According to almost all scientific calculations, impact is now certain. The resulting ‘nuclear winter’ will block out the sunlight, making life impossible for all but the most basic organisms.
As the end looms ever closer, society is beginning to break down. While some choose to soldier on as best they can, many people have abandoned their former lives completely, taking up with new partners, resorting to a life of crime, racing across the world in order to tick off items on their personal bucket list before it’s too late. Health, safety and business services have been wound down to the minimum as staffing levels fall. The police have given up on solving crimes, concentrating instead on basic law enforcement. It is against this background that we meet our quiet hero, erstwhile police detective Henry Palace. With the entire detective division stood down, Hank’s services are no longer required. But as one of the ‘soldier on’ brigade, his response to the impending catastrophe is: business as usual. When an old friend, Martha Milano, begs him to find her missing husband, he feels he has no option but to take up the challenge, especially as the husband in question used to be a cop.
Brett Cavatone was one of the best: hardworking, fair, incorruptible. He had promised Martha he would be with her until the end. Why would he disappear, and where would he go? Most are sceptical of Hank’s quest – it seems clear that Brett, like so many others, has run away to another life. But for Hank there are clear indications that Martha’s husband is not your typical ‘bucket lister’. When his enquiry stalls, he turns to his wayward sister Nico for help. As his sole remaining family member, Nico is precious to Hank, but their relationship in recent months has not been easy. Will the mystery of Brett’s disappearance help reunite them?
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There are books that are great – books that change one’s thinking, realign one’s ambitions, achieve a standard of excellence that forms a definitive statement about literature itself. These books will be different for every reader but I think most readers would agree that such works are rare, that rarity, in a sense, is the point of them. Less rare but equally important in cementing a lifelong love of reading are those books that are good. Good as in well crafted, solidly conceived, intelligent, entertaining, thought-provoking, literate and compelling. As with the great books, we will all have our favourites, our own reasons for choosing them. Many of these good books fall into the various categories of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, espionage and of course crime.
A good genre novel – a novel in which plot is the driver but not the whole, in which style is not the overall arbiter but is not absent either, in which action is driven by character and the writer is driven by a love of the written word – is a thing of rare beauty. Reading a novel such as William McIlvaney’s Laidlaw or Ruth Rendell’s A Demon in My View gives me intense pleasure because of how well made it is, and I will often find myself revelling in that well-madeness – the attention to detail, the skilfully-turned sentences, the love of story – as much as I might revel in the passionate expressionism of Roberto Bolano or the linguistic or conceptual fireworks of Nabokov or Borges. My pleasure in Ben H. Winters’s Last Policeman books has been driven by this – their well-madeness, the author’s respect for the reader’s intelligence, the joy of a good story, well told.
Part of what I loved about The Last Policeman was the way the book worked equally well as a police procedural and as a science fiction novel. This proved equally true of the follow-up, Countdown City, with Winters’s knowledge and love of both genres clearly evident. I will definitely be returning to read the final novel in the series, World of Trouble, but owing to present circumstances, that might not be for a while.
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Strange though this may seem to some, I initially picked up Countdown City because of the corona crisis. It felt peculiarly like the right time to read about an honest cop fighting for justice in a world that was going to hell. I was therefore surprised to find how deeply this novel affected me. Our situation is not Hank’s situation (thank goodness) but I found it almost uncanny, how much the imagery in Countdown City seemed to reflect aspects of what we have seen across the world in the past few weeks: the accelerating pace of change, the actualisation of situations and behaviours that would have been inconceivable just three months ago. Most of all the fragility of what we accept as normality, how normality can be dismantled literally overnight:
Ruth-Ann, ancient and gray-headed and sturdy, stops by to clear our dishes and slide ashtrays under the cigars, and everybody nods thanks. Besides the oatmeal and the cheese, the main refreshment she can offer is tea, because its chief ingredient is water, which for now is still running out of the taps. Estimates vary on how long the public water supply will last now that the electricity is down for good. It depends on how much is in the reserve tanks, it depends on whether the Department of Energy has prioritized our city generators over other sections of the Northeast – it depends, it depends, it depends…
There is nothing particularly new in Countdown City. As the current proliferation of book lists and think pieces and memes reminds us, the imagery of dystopia and apocalypse is so familiar it is becoming shop soiled. Yet there is something in the measured tone, the matter-of-factness of Winters’s rendition of these archetypes that feels distinctive, and distinctly uncomfortable as we encounter barely amended versions of them in our own locked-down lives. Hank Palace is the ideal narrator: compassionate whilst remaining objective, he is used to taking note of the details, of observing people in their physical environment and their mental distress. Whilst being under considerable strain himself, he is able to analyse a situation from all angles, to find empathy with all, even with those whose actions are dangerous and selfish:
We cut across the room, Houdini and I, weave through the big ungainly piles of take-what-you-want scattered and heaped on blankets in the middle of the room. Broken shells of computers and phones, empty buckets and deflated soccer balls, big picked-over piles of the kind of useless articles once found in pharmacies and big-box stores: greeting cards, reading glasses, celebrity magazines. The really valuable objects are in the manned stalls: dairy goods and smoked meats, cans and can openers, bottles of water and bottles of soda. It’s all barter and exchange, though some stalls still have prices posted, dating from the peak of hyperinflation, before the dollar economy collapsed… One huge individual in a camouflage hunting jacket stands in the center of his uncluttered stall, silent and serious, under a sign reading simply GENERATORS.
I think what has affected me most about reading Countdown City precisely now is the way it reminds us of how, with just a few unlucky throws of the dice, the fantastical could become the quotidian. Hank Palace is not battling zombies, and although he is seriously injured by a sniper at one point, he does not shoot anyone himself. The violence that occurs in Countdown City does not consist of orchestrated set pieces, or bad guys gunning down bad guys in a final battle – mainly it’s just ordinary people, terrified because their world is being held to ransom, the medical supplies are running out and there’s no food on the shelves, let alone toilet rolls…
With his Last Policeman trilogy, Ben H. Winters has taken the police procedural in a fascinating direction. His writing is solid, articulate, knowing and his plotting is a joy. For anyone looking to make the acquaintance of a compelling detective character without the histrionics or the drink problem, Hank Palace is your man. I can thoroughly recommend Countdown City – though maybe you’d be best to set it aside for a sunnier day.