Dorian Lynskey (Picador, UK; Pantheon, US, November 2024)
To the surprise of almost no one, the big winner at the Academy Awards last month was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan鈥檚 biopic of the father of the atomic bomb. The film鈥檚 success speaks to our age-old obsession with end times. Be it fire, flood or pestilence, humanity has always fantasised about its doom.
In Everything Must Go: The stories we tell about the end of the world, writer Dorian Lynskey explores this curious impulse and how it has shaped modern culture. He starts by addressing that most influential and fervid of religious cataclysms, the Christian apocalypse outlined in the Bible鈥檚 Book of Revelation. This was later overtaken by fears of the atomic bomb, he argues, yet Revelation imagery still pervades modern eschatology, the branch of theology studying the end of days.
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In pinpointing the first narratives about a secular apocalypse, Lynskey adds forgotten details to a well-worn moment of literary history: that gloomy summer of 1816 when Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley joined Lord Byron and John William Polidori in Geneva, Switzerland. A writing contest between them resulted in Frankenstein, by Wollstonecraft Godwin (published under the name Mary Shelley 鈥� she had married the poet by then). It also produced Darkness, a poem by Byron that Lynskey calls 鈥渁 radically godless vision of the end of the world鈥�.
Less well known is the crisis in which it occurred. The previous year, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) had erupted, spewing out so much dust that global temperatures dropped by 0.7掳C, turning 1816 into 鈥渢he year without a summer鈥�. Famine and typhus swept Europe. So, too, did proselytising that the end was nigh.
In its 500-odd pages, Everything Must Go documents the threats faced by civilisation over the years, some more real than others. Each chapter, focusing on scenarios such as the rise of machines or a catastrophic fall in fertility, offers an uneven mix of culture and science. Some chapters favour the former, including one on what Lynskey calls 鈥渋mpact fiction鈥�, concerning asteroids, comets and planets striking Earth. Others, like a section on the development of nuclear weapons, firmly focus on science.
Lynskey makes pleasing connections between disparate sources of potential catastrophe. 鈥淭he first person ever to sketch the contours of a mushroom cloud was the young physicist Luis Alvarez, who watched the Trinity test from the cockpit of an observation aeroplane,鈥� Lynskey writes. Alvarez and his son Walter would later show that an iridium-rich sediment layer found worldwide indicates that an asteroid impact triggered the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
While it is a comprehensive guide to how humanity has imagined its doom, Everything Must Go is less convincing when it comes to what that means. You may wonder why we are obsessed with end times, for instance. Lynskey does float a few ideas. Chronocentrism 鈥� the cognitive bias that we live in an unprecedented moment capable of definitively shaping the future 鈥� could play some part, as could the prevailing belief that, in some way, we deserve destruction for our sins, religious or otherwise.
There are insights into the minds of those particularly drawn to apocalyptic narratives. For example, some experts think that doomsday prepping is unique to the US, part of the rugged individualism shaping that nation. But readers may crave a more scientific basis for Lynskey鈥檚 statements on human nature.
That said, his book is filled with lesser-known cultural gems. And by saving some of his most interesting arguments for the final section on climate and the epilogue, Lynskey has succeeded at a difficult task: how to end a book about endings.
