Review of Alas, Bablyon by Pat Frank

If there were ever a place to explore the potentialities of the Cold War, it was through fiction. Mushroom clouds in the imagination are a much better place to perform experiments of how things might turn out if somebody finally 'pushed the button'. And indeed there was a good chunk of fiction through the 50s and 60s exploring what nuclear world war might look like. One of the better specimens, at least of the six or seven that I've read, is Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959).

Alas, Babylon is the story of several people, but none so dominant as Randy Bragg. Korean War veteran now attorney, he lives in Fort Repose, a rural area of inland Florida. Randy's brother Mark calls one day, telling him to start preparing for the big one in secret. Tensions with Russia are about to boil over. The H-bombs fly and Randy's world as he knows it is turned upside down. Miami, Orlando—the majority of the US blown to smithereens, Randy and his small town acquaintances must all take a new tack on life, one increasingly stiff by the day.

Alas, Babylon is an exploration of what if? What if the nuclear bombs started flying? What would be the effect on everyday people? Taking a practical, quotidian approach, Frank progressively deconstructs society as each bit of civilization dwindles away. Not an echo of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, however, Frank takes a classic American approach to the situation. Where there is a will there is a way... frontier justice... and good ol' fashioned picking yourself up by the seat of the pants, these are the pillars the book is built on.

But Alas, Babylon is not so quaint as to be unreadable in 2025. Frank's prose is super clean, and he uses it to describe the necessary quotidian details to bring the domestic scenes to life. There are a couple scenes that are of their time, but by and large the concerns of Randy and the group that comes to live with him would be our concerns. The reader today can relate.

So where does Alas, Babylon fit in the spectrum of Cold War fiction out there? I would put it somewhere close to Nevil Shute's On the Beach. The books have opposing tones, but both Frank and Shute effectively use the details of everyday life to bring out their characters' responses to nuclear fallout. George Stewart's Earth Abides and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz are both more interested in abstract ideas to be comparable. Stephen King's The Stand is far edgier. It's not satire like Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. And Alas, Babylon can't hold a candle to the obtusely acute angles that are Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker or Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney. Frank's novel is staid humanism with more than a drop of American innocence coloring the mix, take it at that.

In the end, Alas, Babylon is an easy read that lightly explores the practical response to nuclear war. What happens when you take away the things that gives us civilization as we know it? Randy Bragg is a reasonably interesting main character. In many ways he is a stereotype of the 1950s American male, but he does possess enough nuance to stand on his own.