The End Specialist [Paperback]

'The End Specialist' ('The Postmortal' in the US) is the first novel by Drew Magary, previously better known as an American sports blogger and the author of 'Men With Balls'.

'The End Specialist' takes its cue from Max Brooks' 'World War Z', a superior zombie apocalypse thriller. One of the strengths of that book was that once the reader had allowed the premise - the appearance of a disease that killed and reanimated human beings - almost everything else followed logically, with Brooks' plausible descriptions of events taking on an almost documentary quality and the rapidly shifting point of view building up a composite portrait that was ultimately more convincing than any one person's testimony.

Magary's premise is if anything more plausible than Brooks'. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, an American scientist accidentally discovers a treatment for ageing. Persons to whom 'the cure' is administered cease to age beyond their 'cure date'. Magary follows the life of a young lawyer, John Farrell, who uses his relative wealth and connections to take the cure in the early days of its development, at a time when it is still technically illegal. He is now immortal in the sense that he has ceased to age, although he is still vulnerable to accident and disease.

So far, so good. Magary goes on to follow Farrell's life as a 'postmortal', as the unforeseen consequences of the accidental discovery of immortality work themselves out in a world that hasn't thought very hard about the possible implications - a world that is still riven by political and social divisions, international rivalries and the impending exhaustion of natural resources.

'The End Specialist' is never less than readable, but it isn't as good a book as 'World War Z'. John Farrell isn't a particularly interesting protagonist, and although Magary switches away from him periodically he is almost always the centre of attention. But the larger problem lies with Magary's shortcomings as a writer. His talent is essentially comic, and he gets a lot of mileage out of the blackly humorous scenes in which Farrell is forced to adapt to social changes and the events of his unnaturally prolonged existence by changing profession.

But Magary has little feeling for the tragic, and relies far too heavily on melodrama and unlikely coincidences for the reader to take him seriously when the tone darkens. The book is also very male and very American in tone: the female characters exist only in relation to the men, and the rest of the world exists only insofar as parts of it pose a threat to the United States (cartoonish visions of Russia and China). Another weakness is that Magary's ideas concerning the possible consequences of practical human immortality are rather obvious and uninventive; the book doesn't do enough in this regard to distinguish itself from others, and by the end feels rather generic.

In sum: 'The End Specialist' is readable, occasionally exciting and often amusing, but not in the first rank of recent books of this type.

I couldn't put it down.

Which is rare for a work of fiction for me. I read this almost in a single sitting, pausing only for a few hours sleep. Now I have finished, I'm glad I know how it ends - and this time I didn't read the end prematurely - another unusual thing for me, but I am left wondering deeply.

Currently there's a TV series running in the UK, that has the same central premise - no one dies. but Drew Macary's book makes it sound plausible and real. Here, gene therapy means you don't age and therefore don't die, but you can still die - of injury, illness etc. You just don't get old.

The book examines the moral ethical issues, how old must you be before you can gain immortality, what happens to a life sentence when you could live for ever, should marriage be for life and many more; and comes up with some answers and a whole lot more questions. It's not a heavy read however, so you could give it to someone who doesn't like scifi and they would enjoy it or you could read it somewhere like the beach. What it will do is have you asking people around you "would you choose immortality" and then blasting them with the good and bad points.

The story is pretty good as well. There's some plot twists that you definately won't see coming, the characters are rounded; I felt genuinely sad for one of them by the end. In all it's a book that will have you thinking and involved and I throughly recommend it.

The End Specialist is a sci-fi thriller initially set in the very near future where the cure for ageing is discovered. Initially only available on the black market, it doesn't make those who take it immune from disease or other causes of death, but it does stop them from ageing in any way. The book follows John Farrell, a young lawyer who gets the cure and then documents its effect on both himself and society in general through a period of many decades.

From the outset, the style of the book is worthy of considerable praise. It's primarily written in blog style, with John Farrell being the author, but is also broken up with news stories and such to give the reader a more rounded view of the world. Writing the book in this way verges on genius in the circumstances, and allowed me to become fully immersed not just in the plot, but in the world itself, from the very start.

It is perhaps expected that this 'miracle' cure is not the overwhelmingly positive force that it first appears to be, and as with most near future sci-fi stories of this nature things do take twisting turns for the worse. In this regard it always seems quite straightforward to imagine how society might initially be negatively impacted by a new piece of technology or disastrous event, but the challenge in the genre is always developing society going beyond the initial twist.

The End Specialist tracks society over a number of decades, to the point where the way the world works becomes almost unrecognisable in many ways towards the end of the book. But what is very clear is that Magary has put considerable thought and effort into constructing this new society as the timeline advances. Rather than coming up with a good idea and then milking in an almost one dimensional fashion from that point on, Magary has asked himself 'what if' many times over, and has clearly put a lot of work into the outcomes.

The end result is that the world of The End Specialist becomes completely believable, almost terrifyingly so at times, and I have to admit that it completely hooked me all the way through. There are two distinct plots in the book, that of John Farrell personally, and the wider effect of proceedings on the world in general, but both are woven together in a meticulous manner. All in all, The End Specialist is a book that at times is funny, sad, thrilling and horrifying, but it is the relentless progress of the plot, with an almost endless stream of interesting twists and ideas, that kept me reading until the end. I genuinely cannot recommend this highly enough; it is everything that a book of this nature should be.