Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell – review

While the publication dates of many books may have been pushed back in the light of the current crisis, this one is right on the money. Mark O’Connell’s quest to locate the various manifestations of our collective apocalypse-anxiety might have been written with the long hours of global lockdown in mind. “It was the end of the world, and I was sitting on the couch watching cartoons with my son,” he begins. He proceeds like Noah sensing rain in the air.

Related: Real estate for the apocalypse: my journey into a survival bunker

O’Connell’s previous book, To Be a Machine, was an inspired journalistic exploration of “transhumanism”, the subculture that wants to fast-forward to a technological future in which man becomes part-machine. This one is haunted by the idea that, unless we change our ways, or even if we change our ways, our species does not have much of a future at all. For O’Connell, those fears had been sharpened by recent fatherhood.

There are competing voices in his head. One insists, “we are alive in a time of worst-case scenarios… Attune your ear to the general discord and you will hear the cracking of the ice caps, the rising of the waters… Is it not a terrible time to be having children, and therefore in the end, to be alive?” Another voice counters, “[but] when in the scheme of things was it ever a good one?” A third – generally prompted by his wife – argues for a bit of perspective: “I was not John of Patmos… this was a house and people were trying to live in it.”

O’Connell has a gift for channelling the “sense of looming crisis” that characterises our times, but is able to step outside it, to bring it into focus. This project began for him toward the end of 2016, that disabling year, when his therapist suggested to him that “it might be helpful not to spend quite so much time following the news”. His response to that suggestion was a kind of personal aversion therapy: he would not shut himself off from the portents of end times that buzz-alerted his phone, but follow them to the ends of the Earth.

To this end, he tracked down “preppers” for apocalypse purchasing bunkers in South Dakota; he listened in to those disciples of Elon Musk who believe our best hope is colonising Mars; he self-isolated in Alladale, the re-wilded retreat in the Highlands of Scotland; and he journeyed to New Zealand, the promised land of doom-harbingers everywhere.

If there is a thread running through these travels, it is that knotted relationship between Silicon Valley plutocrats and our collective unconscious. As O’Connell shows, the billionaires of digital media seem particularly in thrall to a coming apocalypse, and to lavishly self-indulgent strategies to survive it. Perhaps it is because outrageous fortunes give them control-freak dreams of immortality. Perhaps it is because they understand the darker implications of the monsters they have created.

O’Connell exposes their schemes with a likable zeal. His journey to the post-apocalypse hideaway of PayPal founder Peter Thiel is in itself a wonderful piece of journalism, in which he traces Thiel’s obsessions – with disaster capitalism, cryogenics, surveillance technology, The Lord of the Rings – to a piece of real estate on New Zealand’s south island. Like Louis Theroux cast in Heart of Darkness, he swims in the pure survivalist waters of Thiel’s private lake. “I was drinking apocalypse water, symbolically reclaiming it for the 99%,” he writes. “If in that moment I could have drained Lake Wanaka just to fuck up Thiel’s end of the world contingency plan, I might well have done so.”

The disaster scenarios the quest is concerned with are mostly the terrors of climate change. Pestilence hardly gets a look-in, although you are occasionally given pause by prophetic allusions to our current circumstance. One surprising voice co-opted into Musk’s belief that we need to colonise Mars as a “backup planet” is Stephen Hawking, who argued that “to stay [on Earth] risks annihilation. It could be an asteroid hitting Earth. It could be a new virus… For humans to survive, I believe we must have the preparations in place within 100 years.”

As a premonition of that post-human planet, O’Connell visits the Chernobyl exclusion zone. He joins an annual 36,000 tourists on a guided tour of unimaginable catastrophe. What he sees there is less “a barely conceivable tragedy of the very recent past, than a vast diorama of an imagined future, a world in which humans had ceased entirely to exist”. They wander the abandoned town of Pripyat as if it were Pompeii, unearthing children’s drawings in crumbling schoolrooms. Inside a vast unfinished cooling tower next to the Chernobyl plant, he watches a pair of kestrels looping high above and reaches for biblical reference, the “blood-fevered edict of Isaiah”, of the land lying desolate for eternity, “a haunt for jackals, a home for owls”.

In some ways, experiencing this abyss, this holy of holies for catastrophists, acts as something of a catharsis for O’Connell. Having looked on these human ruins, he finds himself, counterintuitively, resisting Ozymandias-like despair. What brings him back to life is the birth of his second child, a daughter, who arrives with their home in Dublin in the midst of a “status red weather warning”. Her presence, that “tiny engine of joy” she represents, is beautifully evoked by O’Connell, in passages that capture exactly that mixture of impossible vulnerability and responsibility, the enforced mindfulness of new parenthood.

The prophet that has provided the most comfort to him in his journey has been Dr Seuss, his son’s hero, and in particular those words from The Lorax, that indelible primer in apocalypse and its unlikely flipside, hope: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” He picks those words up again here, not in any mawkish way, but as a clear-eyed rejoinder to the implications of what he has witnessed in his three-year odyssey. Among other things, O’Connell is good at dramatising the way we turn things over in our minds.

Tentatively, sporadically, he finds he is losing his taste for nihilism, that insistent thrum of doom that shadows social media habits. “Lately, I have been glad to be alive in this time, if only because there is no other time in which it is possible to be alive,” he says. O’Connell’s journey to this realisation – though hugely engaging - does not always make comfortable reading with the world grinding to a halt outside, but he leaves the reader with that word, which offers the gift of making any future possible: “unless”.

• Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O’Connell is published by Granta (£14.99)