An abandoned car on a deserted road, some expired food. It is in this environment that a father and his son, both survivors of the “viruscorona” which has just decimated 95% of the world population, are attacked by wild dogs. So begins Year of the Lion, a novel by Deon Meyer that France took in 2017 for a postapocalyptic narrative. No one imagined at the time that this fiction was already telling the story of the current coronavirus pandemic. Not even its author.
The South African writer had yet scientifically validated that the coronavirus was indeed the most dangerous pathogen for the human race and the planet. He had worked on its transmission and its consequences on our globalized societies, from the passage from animals to humans to intercontinental contamination, through the closing of borders or the diversion of protective masks, which have become weapons of this funny war…
Three years after the translation of the novel into French, the framework that underlies it, improbable yesterday for an average imagination, has become reality. Funny foreshadowing! Including Deon Meyer, who plunged back into his notes, himself a little afraid to discover that his novel had anticipated a planetary catastrophe.
Humanity decimated by a coronavirus is the starting point for The Year of the Lion. How did you get that idea ?
To be honest, with Year of the Lion, I wanted to explore our world first after a virus wiped out the world’s population, not so much the pandemic itself. It turns out that the stories of the chaotic experience of the characters during the pandemic did not stop inviting themselves into the book, which forced me to do research on the nature of pandemics and try to imagine what that it would be to experience such a situation.
To stage this fictional post-apocalyptic world that I wanted, I had to kill 95% of the world’s population but leave all of the infrastructure intact. My research for the novel was done after the appearance of the H5N1 avian flu in 1996 and the H1N1 swine flu in 2009-2010. These two terrifying crises, as well as the recurrent Ebola epidemics in Africa, gave me the idea to explore the possibility that a virus was causing the apocalypse that I needed.
So I started looking for a world class virus expert and came across Professor Wolfgang Preiser, head of the department of medical virology at the University of Stellenbosch.
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