In terms of body count it’s a holocaust of a novel but Bagley treats it with unnerving detachment and a kind of brisk no-nonsense certainty. Battlefields are traditionally immensely confused places but not in Bagley’s novel, where the characters are able to analyse the movements of opposing forces with clinical accuracy, as if studying it in a study decades later. Similarly, being in the middle of a hurricane is probably a severely disorientating experience but it doesn’t stop Wyatt delivering quite a lot of encyclopedia britannica-style information disguised as dialogue. And there is an opportunity to package more up-to-date research when Wyatt and Dawson emerge from their foxhole to see the entire length of the Negrita river valley lined with thousands of civilian survivors of the storm and Wyatt is able to deliver a short lecture about Disaster Shock.