Reading Without Light

Now that I've got you all relaxed, laughing, and feeling celebratory, I'm gonna hit you with this scary book review. In honor of Green Bean's Bookworm Challenge, I've been inching (like a worm...get it?) my way through a few books this month. Along with the Humanure book recently reviewed, I had a couple of other books from the library. They were filled with information I had already absorbed from other books on frugal or sustainable living. I decided to return them unread, because I was really itching to read my latest book from the used bookstore.

The Peak Oil Paranoia blog started out the year with a little teaser about this book by Alex Scarrow. The PeakReady Blog mentioned it again a couple days later and I watched the video trailer for it. It's an interesting marketing tactic, using a trailer to promote a book. Once you watch and listen to this, you'll see why I was interested in checking out the book. Go ahead. Watch it. I'll wait.





*** MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW ***


Says the Elephant wearing striped pants at flickr.com.

It is impossible to tell you much at all about this book without spoilers. If you don't wish to learn the whole story, stop reading now. Go read some of the brief reviews online or the description on the author's website.


The book opens with a young girl, Leona, in a hotel with her family on the eve of the Millenium. The father, Andy, has an important secret meeting upstairs in their room and the family waits downstairs. The girl has wandered up to see if the meeting is over yet. When she accidently enters the room next door, she interrupts three old men talking. A fourth man, younger, strides towards her purposefully and with his hand in his pocket. One of the old men stops him and the girl is ushered out of the room.

This brief two page introduction sets the tone for the book. Immediately, you feel tension and start wondering what is going on. Was the father meeting with these men? What were they meeting about? Why did the young man keep his hand in his pocket? Will Leona remember the men she saw? Does it matter if she does?

Fast forward to present day and we find Andy's wife, Jenny, packing up the house in London for their pending divorce. Leona is at University. Andy, a geologist, is off in Iraq working as a risk assessment consultant examining pump stations and infrastructure damaged in the war. Andy's family has grown tired of his obsession with peak oil issues and increasing paranoia since that meeting in New York at the turn of the century. Given the slightest opening, he runs on and on about how easy it would be to trigger peak oil artificially by destroying key extraction and distribution points, and how this would impact the world. He lays out just how fragile 'life as we know it' is, with oil being the center of a complex interconnected web of civilization. Without oil, human society would collapse.

The family is sick of hearing about this until they see the scenario begin to unfold exactly as he predicted. Fighting and riots break out in the Middle East after a bomb explodes at a holy site, followed by explosions at major refineries and an oil super-tanker. Overnight, the flow grinds to a halt and the world finds out just how dependent modern life is on oil.

The story focuses on this family, with settings in Iraq as Andy struggles to get out to return to his family and in England with the rest of the family. With Andy's stories stirring their memories and brief phone calls to him confirming their worst fears, the family tries to make it to a safe place. Jenny is out of town for an interview, where she hoped to start her new life after the divorce. Leona is directed by her father to pick up her little brother at boarding school and go to a friend's house to wait for them. And, oh, by the way, go pick up some food on the way home.

Adding another layer of danger into the mix is the hitman tracking Leona to silence her once and for all, as he felt he should have been allowed to do when she stumbled into the wrong hotel room years before. She made the mistake of emailing a note to her father in Iraq that she had seen one of those three men on television and recognized him. The men have been keeping track of Andy ever since he wrote that special report for them. Leona is now a danger to them.

It doesn't take long for the government to realize it is woefully unprepared for this artificial Peak Oil situation. The country is dependent on imported energy and food, and there are inadequate supplies on hand. Instead of calming the public, the Prime Minister blows the news conference by letting slip that the situation is dire. Not surprisingly, panic erupts in the street with everyone immediately rushing to stock their pantries. The government starts taking steps to control remaining oil supplies (reserves and petrol stations) by shutting down all transportation and highways, while pulling their soldiers out of Iraq to help protect these meager supplies from the public.

Jenny is now stranded away from her children and Andy is stranded in Iraq. The journey home for each is harrowing. Andy must get out of a foreign country with diminishing military support and increasingly hostile natives. Jenny's journey highlights the difficulties of trying to travel when all avenues of standard transportation have been cut off. The public is not happy and quickly overwhelm traffic control efforts. Any source of available food or water, for the water taps soon stop flowing, is quickly looted. Mob mentality takes over when resources become scarce and people become desperate. The bodies start piling up. And this is only a few days into the disaster.

Leona and her brother bunk down at the house of a family friend while the city turns into an urban hell around them. Rioting in the streets makes venturing out dangerous, and rampaging gangs have taken over the neighborhood, looting one house after another on their street. The hitman continues narrowing in on his target, searching to find where they are hiding. When the vicious gang focuses on their house, they are slowed down by the boobytraps set for them. Once they make it inside, there's no sign of Leona or her brother but it is just a matter of time before their hiding place is discovered. Of course, just in the nick of time, someone runs off the gang. The parents soon re-unite with the kids and we breathe easy for just a moment.

There is a final face-off with the hitman and the family, ending in the death of the hitman and critical injury of Andy. In the build-up to this last fight, the hitman murders an associate of Andy's and reveals the extent of power held by those who employ him. A core group of 12 directs human history, intervening to move it in whatever direction they wish. They are the ones who orchestrated the peak oil situation.

As the story was unfolding, I kept wondering who might benefit from rioting, lawlessness, and mass starvation. The only plausible explanation my sweetie and I could come up with was population reduction. Sure enough, this turned out to be the motive for their machinations. Dwindling oil supplies required a massive reduction in the number of people on the planet in order to support the lifestyle desired. However, they failed to consider the events would take on a life of their own and spiral further out of control than they wanted. Nor did they consider the difficulty of bringing the damaged infrastructure back online to return to a petroleum-based world.

The book ends with the family, minus the father, living in a new community eighteen months later. The group that took them in was not composed of preppers or survivalists, but rather historical re-enactors that had learned the old skills of everyday living for their avocation. In a new world, it became their vocation as they did for themselves what oil used to do for them.

This book was a terrifying and suspense-filled ride. While I doubt we face the likelihood of an artificially created peak oil event that drops us off a cliff like this, it allowed the compression of the concepts and consequences of peak oil in a short time span for the book. I found myself stopping my reading occasionally to go put up more food. I cooked my last pumpkin and will be freezing the puree today - after making another double batch of muffins. I juiced grapefruits cleaned off from my tree. And I encouraged my sweetie to work on some kind of storage for extra water. I also swept through the house one more time, letting go of additional books, multimedia, and art.

The book was a reminder of how fragile our current way of life is. Without oil or easy energy resources, everything grinds to a halt. The majority of people do not have a clue how to survive without supermarket food, water flowing from the tap, power, or motorized transportation. They panic and behave in ugly horrible ways. Gangs and tribes form quickly and rampage when the trouble-makers realize there is nobody to stop them from indulging their every evil whim. Even individuals start to question why it matters if they do the right thing. This book strongly reinforced the message others have put forth that community is as important as preparation for a more sustainable, lower impact, post peak oil life. (It also made me want to get the heck out of this city numbering over a million people!)

If you want more, check out the forum on Alex Scarrow's website. He's considering writing a sequel...