Key Details
- Voice: Will Patton takes all eleven hours and eleven minutes alone, and the sole description of that performance is the publisher's closing sentence, which calls it ominous while misspelling possibilities.
- Big ideas: Nuclear war and the morning after, a spared Florida town, community under collapse, Cold War dread as ordinary weather.
- Atmosphere: Ominous, procedural, dated in ways the book comfortably survives.
- Worth it?: A 1959 novel that still lands, in a recording the publisher praises and nobody else has ever described.
Only one sentence on this record says anything at all about the recording, and it carries a typo. Will Patton's narration paints this classic tale as an ominous picture of the terrible possibilites of the nuclear age. The missing letter belongs to the publisher, not to me. Audible Studios put the audiobook out in December 2010, eleven hours and eleven minutes of it, and the ninety-five words of description end on exactly that sentence: a compliment to the narrator, misspelled, standing in for everything else a buyer might reasonably want to know.
Listeners arriving cold should understand what the description withholds. Two fateful words herald the end, the copy says, and "a nuclear holocaust ravages the United States" until "a thousand years of civilization are stripped away overnight, and tens of millions of people are killed instantly." What the copy never mentions is who did it. No aggressor, no year, no politics of any kind. That omission falls somewhere between tact and salesmanship, and the reviewers repair it inside their first paragraph.
Readers who have carried this book for decades supply the context the jacket dropped. One dates it to 1959, back when the space program and commercial jet travel were both new. Another places it "in the 50s during the Cold War scare" and names the other side outright, describing "how society crumbled after nuclear holocaust with the Soviet Union." Neither fact appears in the publisher's copy anywhere. The novel's whole historical situation reaches a buyer through the response section or it does not reach them at all. Anyone skipping the reviews starts the novel with no idea which decade produced it.
Every good book about the end of the world has to decide how much of the ending to show, and this one, by the copy's own account, is finished with it early. The event is instantaneous. What remains is a small town in Florida, miraculously spared, where "men and women of all backgrounds join together to confront the darkness." That is a survival novel about neighbors and administration, not about the blast, and eleven hours is an enormous amount of room to hand to whatever happens once the largest event in the plot is already behind you.
Why It Works in Audio
The case for the recording rests entirely on Will Patton, and the only party making that case is the party selling it. Audible Studios calls the narration ominous and credits it with painting the novel as a picture of the nuclear age, which is a publisher describing its own merchandise. Nobody writing in has confirmed or contradicted the claim in fifteen years. That is a conspicuous silence on a title whose entire audio proposition is one named performer and nothing else.
A second argument for listening comes out of the reviews, which are strangely preoccupied with the physical business of reading this novel. One remembers seeing it on black and white television at about twelve, being refused it at the library because a parent had to borrow it, and finding a copy weeks later in a drugstore, "in the single four-sided rotating bookrack next to the magazines." Another wanted a personal copy because the one read in the mid seventies had belonged to a mother. Books as objects, remembered across half a century. Audio breaks that chain and begins a different one.
That the novel still lands is the single thing everybody agrees on. The reviewer who calls it dated builds the case with some care, citing the space program, jetliner travel and the electromagnetic pulse effects a book from 1959 could not have anticipated, and then turns the whole argument around at the word Nonetheless. The entry filed from Italy ends on "Pat Frank un mito nel genere." A one-line verdict filed from Germany calls it "One of the best postapocalyptic novels" and stops there. Agreement from three countries about a premise that has not aged so much as changed shape.
Things to Know Before Starting Alas, Babylon
This record carries a series name that plainly belongs to a paperback. The field reads Harper Perennial Olive Edition, with no number beside it, on a recording issued by Audible Studios. That is the name of a book edition sitting in a slot built for a series, which means a buyer of eleven hours of audio is being told which printing the metadata was lifted from. It changes nothing about the audio, and it is a dependable sign that this record was built by a script and read afterward by nobody.
What else wants decoding is a review headlined Fix it. The hundred-odd words underneath that headline are entirely affectionate: black and white television, a library that would not lend the book to a twelve-year-old, and a drugstore clerk who "had no compunction about selling it to me." Nothing in the body asks for anything to be fixed. Four stars, warm from start to finish, filed under an instruction nobody could act on. Headlines and bodies are not always written in the same mood, and a buyer scanning only the titles here would walk away with a badly wrong impression of what these five entries say.
Nothing on this record tells a buyer which edition of the text was used, whether anything was cut, or who produced the thing beyond a studio name. For a novel this old the first of those questions is not idle. The date shown here, December 2010, belongs to the recording. The novel's own date arrives courtesy of a reviewer writing in 2018, which is a peculiar way to learn how old a book is.
Who Will Get the Most From It
Two audiences are obvious. The first is anyone who reads the news now and wants to know how the generation that took this seriously imagined it, because that is what the novel is: an account of the day after, written while the fear was ordinary weather. The second is listeners who like disaster fiction about organization, since the copy promises a spared town and a community assembling itself under conditions nobody had planned for.
Three groups should probably pass. Anyone hoping for the catastrophe itself will find it already finished. Anyone who needs modern technology in a disaster story will be spending eleven hours in a world without it, as the 2018 reviewer takes real trouble to explain. And anybody hoping for a performance vetted before buying will find eleven hours and eleven minutes of Patton summarized in one misspelled sentence by the house selling it. Sixty-odd years on, the fear at the center of this book has changed shape without going anywhere; Patton has eleven hours in which to make that felt.
