Alas, Babylon

I'm currently reading Pat Frank's apocalyptic novel Alas, Babylon, for the first time in over thirty years. A handful of scenes have come back to me as I've read - the accident at Latakia, the little girl blinded by the nuclear flash, a few others. But I just hit something that, momentarily at the least, threw me out of the story.

It's four months after The Day. The central character, Randy Bragg, is musing on the things he misses from before: getting enough fats/sweets/starches, shaving cleanly and painlessly, and...

He missed music. It had been a long time since he had heard music. The record player and his collection of LP's of course were useless without electricity. Music was no longer broadcast, anywhere. Anyway, his second and last set of batteries for the transistor radio was losing strength.

Randy, you dolt, you and the people living with you have available the most versatile musical instrument on the planet, and every last one of you knows how to use it.

:grumble: