In the grip of apocalypse angst

You have to love a book about the end of the world in which the first two references are to Saul Bellow’s Herzog and the HBO series The White Lotus, a high/low combo that preps us for authorial omniscience. In the next few paragraphs we get Marc Maron, Sally Rooney and Frank Kermode. Buckle up, kids, a cultural whirlwind is coming! The day of judgment is at hand, and the all-knowing Dorian Lynskey, who seems to have doomscrolled through every card catalogue on the planet, is just the person to provide live commentary. A capacious cultural history of ‘apocalyptic angst’, his Everything Must Go will make you happy to be alive and reading – until the lights go out.

For a catalogue of catastrophe from Aids to zombies, it’s tidy and well organised, like a corpse laid out by a fussy mortician. Lynskey divides disaster into compartments: impact (comets and asteroids), the Bomb, machines, civilisational collapse, pandemic and climate – and that’s leaving aside God, who scarred us forever with the apocalyptic prophesies of the Book of Revelation, which, as Lynskey puts, it ‘gives humanity’s story a theatrical finale’. The Rapture will come – ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end’ – but in this age of polycrisis you can choose your poison.

For each dismal category Lynskey provides a brief history which winds all the way to the parlous present. His principal focus is on books, fictional and otherwise, but he also considers films, pop songs, comedy routines, poems and the pronouncements of politicians, pollsters and activist organisations. In other words, he’s taking on the culture at large, the stories we’re told, the stories we tell ourselves. ‘On one level,’ he says, ‘this is a history of fear.’