The Last

Written by Hanna Jameson, The Last is a mystery novel that surprises with its mix of genres, and how it develops a protagonist that, although far from memorable, contributes to the main discussions raised by the narrative.

You know the drill. A bunch of people are stranded in a faraway place – in this case a hotel – with a murderer amidst them. They have no access to the internet, no way of contacting the outside world, and no hope of rescue. The Last could have been a very formulaic mystery novel if not for one particular reason: those people are stuck in the hotel because nuclear war has just begun, ending civilization as they know it.

The protagonist is your typical white male protagonist. His name is Jon, he’s intimidated by strong women, judges everyone, acts like he’s always right, and firmly believes that he is perfectly capable of reading people and making good decisions. However, as the story progresses Jon begins to understand that, not only he had been part of the problem from the start, but also that he actually knows nothing.

Jon is stuck in an isolated hotel in Switzerland alongside a bunch of the other guests and staff: after they heard the news about the nuclear bombs, panic ensued and some people tried to flee to the nearby city, while others decided to stay. What already appears to be a bad situation, however, turns out to be even more horrible when they discover the corpse of a little girl inside a water tank. This means that, besides being in a post-apocalyptic scenario, Jon’s group also has to deal with the possibility of having a killer in their midst.

Since he was a history professor before the world ended, Jon decides to keep a journal of the events that are transpiring around him, resulting in the novel’s structure. He is the main figure behind the murder investigation – the others are too worried about the end of the world – and so he starts to interview everyone he can while looking for clues.

The hotel is a great gothic setting: it’s labyrinthine, enormous, cold, and feels devoid of life. People hear sounds and echoes in the night, think about the hotel’s history – which is full of murders and serial killers – and some even believe the place is haunted. At the beginning, Jon perfectly describes the eerie sensation of living there:

“I’m sure I heard guitar music last night. I went for a walk, which was terrifying even by candlelight, and tried to locate the room it was coming from. But I couldn’t find it. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone. Fourteen floors, almost a thousand rooms, and I didn’t see or hear a single person. This place is much larger than I had realized. It makes me feel uneasy.”

The book’s narrative is rife with specters. There is the ghost of the murderer, which is looming over their every action, creating conflict and a sense of distrust by the constant reminder that people can be evil. There is the ghost of the past, with each character having their flaws and secrets being uncovered by others. And there is the ghost of politics, with certain characters being constantly judged by their actions – or inactions – in their last election.

It’s tempting to say that The Last deal with the dangers of electing certain real politicians – Trump and Bolsonaro easily come to mind – with dialogues like this one: ‘Everyone knew how stupid and dangerous it was to vote for that kind of man, and those religious zealots!’ However, the book is far from being about them: it’s much more concerned with the political responsibility of everyone who is in that hotel.

The characters outright blame each other for the nuclear war and everyone seems to be on the brink of starting to physically hurt each other. As they try to survive the apocalypse, politics become a strong point of contention. As the protagonist points out: “I’ve also come to realize that the non-Americans are stockpiling resentment. They blame us, Tomi and me, for what happened. They look at us and see one person who had voted for this to happen and another who hadn’t done enough to stop it.”

Jon didn’t vote for the madman, but that was not enough to stop the war from happening. He knows this and is tormented by his mistakes. He didn’t believe any of that would happen: for the protagonist, politics was just an abstract notion. It was something that happened periodically with the elections and then was over. He couldn’t see the material implications of his vote. It’s one of the privileges you can have for being a white man in The United States: for him, politics could be an unreal, intangible thing. “I remembered feeling doom-laden about politics, but there had been no sense of urgency in me. I had never believed it would come to something like this,” he writes in his diary.

And there are the people who are even more to blame. Tomi, a strong independent woman, actually voted for the madman, but she doesn’t want to be held accountable for it: “I don’t know why anyone would bother bringing this up now. It’s done. Voting, it’s done.” She fails to understand that is not because she didn’t want the catastrophic result that she isn’t responsible for it. People warned and she didn’t listen. The signs were there and she ignored them, preferring to focus on other subjects. And now the world has ended.

Jon is an interesting character because he’s flawed in a way that links him to the political problem they have to face. He is sexist, feeling intimidated and antagonized by women who appear to be stronger than him: “Sophia was an intimidating presence. I was glad I’d had the chance to meet her and get over that preconception. Maybe I’d thought that because I’d only heard her in the kitchen giving orders, and because she was tall.” When he’s doing manual labor, Jon also feels like he’s fulfilling his male role: “We’d accomplished the first of these four mammoth tasks. Embarrassingly, I had never felt more like a man, in the basest sense of the word.”

And it’s not just him. After a while, some of his friends start talking about forcing women to procreate if they really are the last members of the human race, never wasting a chance to treat women’s bodies as their property: “Hypothetically, what do we do if the human race is gonna die out and none of the women want to have babies? It’s a question! I’m just asking the question out loud!” They also discuss gun control, with some people, like Tomi of course, defending that guns make them safer, while others feel exactly the opposite: “The more guns everyone has, the more likely accidents become” – a discussion that begins simple, but becomes increasingly difficult as outsiders start to become a threat.

The novel has several typical scenes from post-apocalyptic stories: there is one, for example, in which they form a group to raid a nearby market, but when they encounter other people there things end badly. This mixture of post-apocalyptic story with murder mystery is an intriguing one because the first genre sheds a new light on the second. Since civilization has ended, the murder of a little girl now feels innocuous. Jon wants to investigate, but his colleagues don’t see a point in what he’s doing: “No one is coming to enforce law. Even if you did find her killer, which you won’t, no one is coming to take him away. What will you do? Do you think you’re the law now?” Their point is a simple one: why worry about a murderer if people are looting, raping, stealing, and even eating each other to survive. Any one of them is just a bad day from becoming a murderer themselves anyway.

But for Jon that is precisely the point: finding and punishing her killer would mean that humanity would remain just a bit civilized. Without any kind of law, they would be reduced to animals trying to survive. The post-apocalyptic setting, then, changes the importance of his task: he’s not doing it for the girl, for revenge, or for an abstract idea of justice. He’s investigating to retain what he can of the world he knew.

The resolution of the novel, however, is a bit rushed. A lot of characters are introduced just before the ending, feeling tacked on, and the murder plot is solved in just a few pages. Add some flat characters, like Dylan – their leader who just acts like a leader –, Adam – a guy who sees ghosts – and Nathan – a guy whose father believed he had encountered God –, and you have a narrative that could have been more complex and greatly benefited from it.

Although its strengths lie more in its political and philosophical discussions than in its murder mystery, The Last is a great novel that successfully mixes two different genres and develops its protagonist around its main themes in an engaging way.

August 03, 2019.