Armando Iannucci wrote an epic poem about COVID-19.
“I have written a mock epic. Epics are, by definition, very long but “mock” permits brevity. It’s a poem in the style of those daunting but rather wonderful depictions of love and loss and the battle between good and evil: The Iliad, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost. The last of those works I spent three years studying for a PhD that I never quite managed to complete. There’s an unconscious connection: my title Pandemonium was a word invented by Milton and first used in Paradise Lost to describe the home of Satan and his fellow fallen angels. Maybe writing Pandemonium is my closure?
“Mock” may imply comedy, but I knew when I was writing it that the last thing I wanted to mock or make amusing was what people endured. Instead, it’s a rather fast and furious distillation of my mixed emotional response to the past year and a half, including, I suppose, all the anger and confusion I felt at our leaders’ catastrophic handling of the first eight months or so of the pandemic. I didn’t want to write a polemic, though; more an expression of bewilderment and regret.”