There’s a part
of me- very cynical but also pragmatic –
that makes me question the sincerity of the youthful protestors around the
world who are protesting the evils of climate change. I don’t doubt the reality
of the threat so much as the sincerity of their motivations, in part because
I’m not sure even they have truly considered why they’re doing it.
I don’t doubt
the reality of the horrors of global warming but the way it is shouted by protestors
always makes me wonder whether the youngest among them have truly
considered how their phrasing it. Even the most devoted scientists admit that
it will be a gradual process rather than a switch being flipped: one day we
will have the world we live in, the next day it will be an apocalyptic
hellscape. Perhaps if that were the case we might be able to unite around the
idea, though I seriously doubt that. What is talked about is a future that will
slowly but gradually become unrecognizable.
I think it is
the fear of the unknown that is driving the youngest among them for a selfish
reason: for all the problems of the world today, many of them have it easier in
most creature comforts than previous generations. They get their food delivered
to them on Grubhub, Uber and Lyft take them anywhere they need to go, they can
get all of the latest films and TV on their phones, all their shopping needs
are done on Amazon and they don’t even have to leave the house to meet with
their friends. What all of these young protestors shout when they say “their
future has been destroyed’ is a euphemism for a fact that they don’t have the
ability to last five minutes without their iphones. None of these teenagers are
Katniss Everdeen and they wouldn’t survive in a world if they couldn’t ask Siri
how to catch and skin a fish. And with social media making this generation
increasingly isolated, the idea of having to form a new society by working
together on anything is a scenario where the survivors would envy the
dead. They don’t even want to have to talk with people with opposing political
views on Twitter; the idea of bonding with them to building a new society is
unthinkable to them.
On the other
end of the spectrum, I don’t truly think the people who have wanted to destroy
their government or longed for a zombie apocalypse have thought it through at
all for pretty much the exact same reasons I listed for the other side. There
has been an enormous amount written and playing out in movies and TV about the
end of the world. (I started a series about it once; you might consider this
book review an unofficial part of it.) Much of it involves outside threats or
larger disasters, from The Walking Dead to A Quiet Place to Snowpiercer.
Even the very best of these series and films rarely look at what happens
after the world ends and when we try to rebuild. (The Mad Max series is
a rare exception and there may be others I’m unaware of.)
I think there
is a part of our society that yearns for this kind of post-apocalyptic world
because today’s world is too complicated. Considering how difficult the world
is, how messy every aspect of it seems and how uncertain the future is, it is
understandable that some of us may think that some form of an apocalypse would
make things easier, in a perverse way. The thing is, nice as that might seem we
all know the end of the world will never be as simple as a switch being thrown.
Survivors we’ll be left behind and we will have to rebuild.
This was made
very clear in so much of the fiction that came out during the Cold War when the
threat of nuclear annihilation seemed around the corner. A lot of the best
fiction of that era took place in dystopian worlds but most of the authors gave
no illusion as to what it would look like. This was clear in such classic as
Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which to date has been remade three
separate times into movies, A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter Miller’s
dark satire set in a future hundreds of years after a nuclear war and Alas,
Babylon by Pat Frank. We got far grimmer perspectives throughout the 1980s,
most notably in such TV movies as The Day After and the film Testament
where we see what happens when nuclear war does occur. When the Cold War
ended in 1991 and nuclear annihilation became far less a direct threat to the
end of the world then before the idea of a nuclear apocalypse has somewhat
diminished in so many end of the world scenarios in our films and TV.
In that sense
Hanna Jameson’s 2019 novel The Last is both a throwback and a reimaging
of these same scenarios. The novel unfolds from the perspective of an American
historian named Jon Keller. He has gone to a conference in Switzerland which at
the last moment was moved to a hotel called L’Hotel Sixieme. Keller is getting
breakfast when he hears a woman scream: “They’ve bombed Washington!”
Keller and his
colleagues then learn of nuclear war on their phones. Washington has been
bombed and the President and his staff are dead. They see footage of it. A
plane crashes on the outskirts of Berlin and it’s because someone uploads the
video that they know Berlin is gone. Then the Internet goes down.
Jon expects the
end to come immediately and as a historian he feels a duty to keep writing. His
wife Nadia and his family are in California and we quickly learn from Jon that
his marriage was in trouble before he went to the conference.
For the next
few weeks, he writes brief journal entries, waiting for the end to come. No one
dies of radiation poisoning but people start committing suicide. Dylan, the
hotel’s head of security takes a role of leadership and starts a routine. He
and some people go hunting, they start rationing food and they vote on the
cutting of gas and electricity. There is a doctor in the hotel. After three
weeks the people start talking to each other. At the end of the fourth, Jon
hears guitar music. After six weeks he goes outside and they see the clouds are
turning orange. The doctor, whose name is Tania, casually mentions the trees
will start dying soon. At the end of the seventh week, Jon writes down: “I’m
going to keep writing. I feel like if I don’t keep writing, I’ll lie down and
die.”
The bulk of the
novel follows and is labeled: “A Narrative Chronicle of the Initial
Post-Nuclear Months by possibly the last living historian, Dr. Jon Keller.” The
novel takes place over the course of three weeks, with Keller often dividing
his daily entries into multiple parts to describe the action that follows. We
later learn he is writing the entries in long-hand rather than using his laptop
because he believes with electricity possibly disappearing, it is more
important to have an analogue story being told.
We learn from
Keller and other people that the possibility of this war had been hanging in
the air for a while. There had been major conferences, news reports and Jon’s
wife had constantly been marching against it. Such details of who struck first
and why is never made clear because the people in the hotel don’t know. We also
never learn the details of why the conflict started or why it is escalated,
though at one point someone holds up a Swiss franc and says this is what it was
all about. We don’t even know how far in the future we are. There is a
suggestion in the middle of the novel when the survivors, most of whom are
foreign born, ask Jon and the only other American in the hotel Toni who they
voted for in the last election. The argument becomes loud very quickly and its
only through a miracle that it doesn’t come to violence. There will be many
other occasions where violence breaks out for far more ‘logical’ reasons.
Jon becomes
close with most of the survivors. Among the more prominent ones is Toni, a
libertarian and an agnostic who has one of the few guns, Nathan, a mixed race
Australian who is one of the more optimistic people in the group, Adam, a
former rock musician who has quite a lot of drugs and alcohol and numerous
foreign couples from everywhere from Japan and Germany. Some know English, some
don’t. Many of them are young; some are older, but all of them acknowledge how
incompetent they are to survive. Nathan admits up front he has no idea how to
start a fire without a lighter; Tania is overwhelmed by her work, most of which
involves being asked for non-existent anti-depressants and everyone spends a
lot of time at the bar. When Adam OD’s on heroin halfway through the novel Jon
and Toni are frantic because ‘there is no 9-1-1’. It’s up to them to save him
and they know when its done, he might not necessarily be grateful.
However because the hotel was once a hunting
lodge there are more than enough guns. (This is Switzerland.) Toni has a
tremendous amount of ammunition, mainly because she is terrified of the
possibility of sexual assault. This is a fear that turns out to be more than
merited when one of the guests attempts to rape a female staff member. The
group makes a decision that they intend to try him for this – and then execute
him. It is done coldly because they know sending him into the forest might kill
him and they don’t want to spend their dwindling supplies as well as time and
energy keeping his prisoner.
Keller mentions
all of this in his writing but his primary focus of his narrative deals with
the discovery of a girl that’s found in the water tower on the roof. Jon
realizes that she couldn’t have gotten up here on her own nor gotten into the
tank. He suspects she has been murdered.
As much to
distract himself from the threat of impending death as well as his only
physical health (he is suffering from a pain in his tooth which he ignores
throughout the novel) Jon decides that he has to find out both who the girl is
and who killed her. The guests are willing to indulge him, though many think he
is wasting his time from the start. But as the novel continues Jon becomes
obsessed to the point of near-psychosis, thinking he needs to do this in order
to stay human in the face of death. That this might not be the best use of his
energy is something that no one suggests at first; everyone needs a reason to
keep going at the end of the world. But as the tensions become greater as the
supplies dwindle, Jon’s obsession turns into something close to paranoia.
As the novel
continues and supplies begin to dwindle the guests now begin to realize their
options are becoming limited. It also becomes clear that there are people residing
in the forest who may be a threat to them. An initial excursion into the
nearest town leads to a reunion with historians at the conference which quickly
escalates into violence and death. Everyone knows winter is coming and is
terrified of what that will mean when the electricity goes and they run out of
water. None of them are talking about what will happen when the worst of it
comes.
Jon doesn’t
want to lead and spends much of the novel letting people he considers more qualified
– Dylan and Nathan among them – do the hard work. Much of his writing takes on
a detached tone but you can tell how shocked he is as the veneer of
civilization continues to erode and how unsuited he is to what comes next. He
holds desperately to trying to find justice for the murdered girl but he is a
horrible detective, making false assumptions that lead him astray, making
increasingly paranoid suggestions to the remaining hotel staff and eventually
Tania thinks he’s had a psychotic breakdown.
In most novels
that unfold in the aftermath of nuclear war (On The Beach is the most
famous example) much of the story unfolds in a pattern of the survivors trying
to maintain a routine while they wait for the inevitable. This doesn’t happen
in The Last or at least not while the narrative is going on. It is worth
noting however, the narrative ends abruptly when we learn Keller’s infection of
his jaw has incapacitated him and it is unclear if he will recover.
What I will say
is that the novel comes to a conclusion with a resolution to who killed the
girl and why she died. It takes place in a world of madness but it’s worth
noting by the time it does Keller is desperate to find a reason and it leads
him to do something that would have been unthinkable for him even after the
bombs dropped.
It’s also worth
noting that there are suggestions throughout the book as to the issue of fate
who are still in the hotel and as to why they were there. Jameson doesn’t come up with a conclusion one
way or the other, mainly because philosophical constructs are irrelevant in the
aftermath of an apocalypse. However, the last lines of Keller’s narrative
suggest – however faintly – that one major character might have had a sense of
the divine. That individual is insane of course, but the two have always been related.
One of the last
set of paragraphs in the book is
profound and because there are no spoilers I think I’ll quote it in its entirety:
“The end of the
world is a fairly comforting concept, because – in theory – we wouldn’t have to
survive it. Maybe what’s been f---ing us up, more than anything, hasn’t been
finding a way to cope with the world ending but finding a way to cope with the
fact that it didn’t.
An ending is
easy. The terminal waking up, morning after morning, isn’t easy. I think that’s
why I’ve been so angry… why I wanted to believe that the girl in the water tank
had died for a more important reason than…continued violence..
Instead of a
conclusion, we’ve been offered nothing but more life. I don’t know how to come
to terms with that.”
Jameson gives
the most realistic issue that we have to deal with when it comes when we
discuss ‘the end of the world’. If it comes through the sea’s rising, a plague
or nuclear war the fact remains it that it will not be as simple as all life on
earth dying with a snap of a finger. There will be people left behind, they
will have to carry on and society will have to adapt to confront the new
realities that are left behind.
That’s what I
believe terrifies the young who are screaming the loudest and we shouldn’t
really be shocked at that. They are excellent at telling all of us what’s wrong
with society but when it comes to how to fix it, they have nothing resembling a
solution. They’re not so much terrified at the idea of the end of the world;
they’re terrified of being left behind to cope with the fact that it didn’t.
The Last doesn’t end
with resolution either, However there is just enough hope remaining behind to
suggest that going on is possible. And the postscript of the novel, written by
a different survivor, gives the barest ray of sunshine that some form of civilization
will continue even after the end. It may be false hope, but it’s still hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment