Chapter Three - The Last by Hanna Jameson
It's very much 'back to normal' for this post after all the excitement the arrival of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments brought!
The idea of this blog is that each book inspires and kind of leads the way, or in some way directs me, to what I read next. I'm not just reading one random book after the next. This is a journey, of sorts. The last chapter of the Never-ending Book Story focused on The Handmaid's Tale. The world of Gilead which it describes is, in many ways, very insular. Very inward looking. Although the novel and its new sequel seem to be frighteningly describing a world that seems increasingly more possible, it's still - thankfully - a fairly alien world. We know from the historical notes included at the conclusion of each book that, ultimately, Gilead fails. From what we read it seems that the world is on a downward spiral until events start to turn in another direction.
I thought for my next step I wanted to read something where the worst had actually happened. Of course, there are a great many novels out there dealing in future dystopias. There are a multitude of zombie apocalypse-type scenarios (The Walking Dead, World War Z), viral infections (Outbreak, The Passage Trilogy) and the rise of AI (Robopocalypse, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). I was looking for a slightly different perspective. And then I happened across The Last by Hanna Jameson while browsing in my local bookshop.
I really wanted this to be good. It was billed on the front cover as being 'a clever, original, scarily plausible white-knuckle read'. Just what I was after. But so many books have quotes like that plastered all over them and they never quite seem to live up to the hype, right?
Inside the back cover is an author bio which says that Jameson began writing the novel during the fallout of 2016 US presidential election. With Trump (I find even typing his name challenging) seeming to be prepared to push the minute hand of the doomsday clock ever closer to midnight, this novel finds a group thrown together at what seems to be the end of the world as we know it. A nuclear apocalypse, no less. The group are all guests at the L'Hotel Sixieme which is in the middle of nowhere. In Switzerland. Quite unexpectedly, nuclear war breaks out. I love the mundane way in which the news breaks:
"A strange noise erupted from one of the tables, a shrill exclamation. The woman didn't say anything, just cried out. I looked up, and she was sitting with her partner - I assume - and staring at her phone. Like everyone else in the room. I thought she had just become over-excited by a message or a photo, and returned to my book, but within seconds she'd added, 'They've bombed Washington!'"
They watch as the destruction of the world rapidly plays out on their devices in 'breaking news' push notifications: BREAKING - 200, 000 FATALITIES ESTIMATED, SAY EXPERTS. It feels chillingly accurate in the way it all happens so quickly and how completely they are isolated from the rest of the world.
The main protagonist is Jon, an American academic in Switzerland for a conference. He begins to keep a journal of events in the hope that his record of what happened may one day be discovered given that it is likely they may not survive for very much longer. In the ensuing panic of the immediate aftermath, most of the guests make a futile dash for airports or flee with no real sense of where they are going. A core of around 20 are left to face the coming days. Whatever they may bring. The novel is basically Jon's journal. And this works very nicely. I like the way that for the first month or so after the proverbial fan has been struck, and before he has realised that keeping a record of events might be useful, his entries are short, panicked and haphazard. Day 48 simply states Keep it together. It's not long after this that they notice the water is turning cloudy and tastes odd. Some of the group climb onto the roof to check out the water storage tanks and discover the body of a young girl. It looks like the body has not been there very long and probably only since the nuclear war began. It would seem there is a killer among the group. In order to distract himself from the impending doom, Jon decides to try and discover what happened to her.
In some ways, I found the murder mystery element of the novel the least interesting. And I found the resolution of it a little 'meh'. I was far more interested in what else was going on. The impact of the global catastrophe and the way it had changed everything. I liked how the group yearned to see the sun now that it is largely obscured by clouds emitting an eerie orange glow. How wildlife starts to disappear and plantlife starts to die. In one scene, they dash outside to stand in a sudden downpour after weeks of no rainfall. I hugely enjoyed how the book echoes the state of the world we live in now:
"...reading news articles online, all of the getting progressively worse, going to march after march amid the creeping sensation that nothing was changing, that governments weren't scared and people were nowhere near as scared as they should be...worrying about your future and whether your children would have one, and then it was all gone...in the space of a day, or maybe longer, but no one could know that because the internet, that big window, was gone too."
The book makes you stop and think about how much we rely on technology and the internet just to get through our daily lives. Life has changed so much because of it and it would alter immeasurably again if it was suddenly taken away from us. Would that be an altogether bad thing? We're all so used to being able to use Google to quickly find information; we use Twitter and Facebook to interact with each other and keep in touch. Imagine what it would be like if that all went away tomorrow.
The setting of the novel is a particular success. The hotel feels almost like a character within the story. In fact, I would have enjoyed more of an exploration of this. We find out that the hotel is famous for a number of suicides having taken place there and it once played host to a serial killer. Some of the characters feel they are there for a reason, like fate drew them to this place. There is an underlying, sinister malevolence to the hotel which puts the reader in mind, of course, of the Overlook hotel in The Shining. How Jameson resisted the urge to locate one of her guests in room 237 is beyond me! I can see how there might be a sequel or - of more interest to me - a prequel. There is certainly scope for it if the author ever felt like revisiting aspects of the story. I think it would be interesting to explore events at other times during the lifespan of the hotel. I'm not sure I need to know what happens next to Jon and the others. I like open endings that leave you to imagine what might come next.
There is one section of the book which comes towards the end of the novel which I must mention. It talks about one of the character's fear of open water and, specifically, large things in the ocean. This is a fear I can relate to. I can't stand not being able to touch the bottom, whether I'm in the sea or a swimming pool. I've never been able to quite put my finger on why (seeing Jaws as a child didn't help) or describe the way it feels. But the following extract does it perfectly and I think it's a bit of a metaphor for the way modern life makes us feel too:
"There's a word for it, megalohydrothalassophobia. Specifically, it means a fear of large things in the water. So it's not really a fear of the sea, it's fear of not knowing what's out there. It's the idea of floating somewhere where you can't see land or anything you can grab on to, in an environment you can't navigate, and where you don't know what's below you. But it could be anything, and it could be so massive, so huge, that it could swallow you whole and you wouldn't even have the perspective to see it coming. All of a sudden, the space below you would get dark, maybe for miles, and you can't see it because you're floating there, no control, you can't swim away and you're struggling for air, just trying to stay afloat and keep your head up, and then, just like that, something the size of a road, or a city, has swallowed you up."
I very much enjoyed this book. More, perhaps, than I initially thought I would. Our world seems to be facing so may problems these days. The Last made me want to explore how we might bring ourselves back from the brink. Is it too late? Are we already doomed? What can we do to make things better? So, for my next read, I'll be tackling 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. Join me for more on that next time.
In the meantime, please don't forget to subscribe and share if you've enjoyed the Never-ending Book Story. Let me know your thoughts on The Last, too by using the comments section below. Also, remember you can find me on Twitter and Instagram.
The idea of this blog is that each book inspires and kind of leads the way, or in some way directs me, to what I read next. I'm not just reading one random book after the next. This is a journey, of sorts. The last chapter of the Never-ending Book Story focused on The Handmaid's Tale. The world of Gilead which it describes is, in many ways, very insular. Very inward looking. Although the novel and its new sequel seem to be frighteningly describing a world that seems increasingly more possible, it's still - thankfully - a fairly alien world. We know from the historical notes included at the conclusion of each book that, ultimately, Gilead fails. From what we read it seems that the world is on a downward spiral until events start to turn in another direction.
I thought for my next step I wanted to read something where the worst had actually happened. Of course, there are a great many novels out there dealing in future dystopias. There are a multitude of zombie apocalypse-type scenarios (The Walking Dead, World War Z), viral infections (Outbreak, The Passage Trilogy) and the rise of AI (Robopocalypse, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). I was looking for a slightly different perspective. And then I happened across The Last by Hanna Jameson while browsing in my local bookshop.
I really wanted this to be good. It was billed on the front cover as being 'a clever, original, scarily plausible white-knuckle read'. Just what I was after. But so many books have quotes like that plastered all over them and they never quite seem to live up to the hype, right?
Inside the back cover is an author bio which says that Jameson began writing the novel during the fallout of 2016 US presidential election. With Trump (I find even typing his name challenging) seeming to be prepared to push the minute hand of the doomsday clock ever closer to midnight, this novel finds a group thrown together at what seems to be the end of the world as we know it. A nuclear apocalypse, no less. The group are all guests at the L'Hotel Sixieme which is in the middle of nowhere. In Switzerland. Quite unexpectedly, nuclear war breaks out. I love the mundane way in which the news breaks:
"A strange noise erupted from one of the tables, a shrill exclamation. The woman didn't say anything, just cried out. I looked up, and she was sitting with her partner - I assume - and staring at her phone. Like everyone else in the room. I thought she had just become over-excited by a message or a photo, and returned to my book, but within seconds she'd added, 'They've bombed Washington!'"
They watch as the destruction of the world rapidly plays out on their devices in 'breaking news' push notifications: BREAKING - 200, 000 FATALITIES ESTIMATED, SAY EXPERTS. It feels chillingly accurate in the way it all happens so quickly and how completely they are isolated from the rest of the world.
The main protagonist is Jon, an American academic in Switzerland for a conference. He begins to keep a journal of events in the hope that his record of what happened may one day be discovered given that it is likely they may not survive for very much longer. In the ensuing panic of the immediate aftermath, most of the guests make a futile dash for airports or flee with no real sense of where they are going. A core of around 20 are left to face the coming days. Whatever they may bring. The novel is basically Jon's journal. And this works very nicely. I like the way that for the first month or so after the proverbial fan has been struck, and before he has realised that keeping a record of events might be useful, his entries are short, panicked and haphazard. Day 48 simply states Keep it together. It's not long after this that they notice the water is turning cloudy and tastes odd. Some of the group climb onto the roof to check out the water storage tanks and discover the body of a young girl. It looks like the body has not been there very long and probably only since the nuclear war began. It would seem there is a killer among the group. In order to distract himself from the impending doom, Jon decides to try and discover what happened to her.
In some ways, I found the murder mystery element of the novel the least interesting. And I found the resolution of it a little 'meh'. I was far more interested in what else was going on. The impact of the global catastrophe and the way it had changed everything. I liked how the group yearned to see the sun now that it is largely obscured by clouds emitting an eerie orange glow. How wildlife starts to disappear and plantlife starts to die. In one scene, they dash outside to stand in a sudden downpour after weeks of no rainfall. I hugely enjoyed how the book echoes the state of the world we live in now:
"...reading news articles online, all of the getting progressively worse, going to march after march amid the creeping sensation that nothing was changing, that governments weren't scared and people were nowhere near as scared as they should be...worrying about your future and whether your children would have one, and then it was all gone...in the space of a day, or maybe longer, but no one could know that because the internet, that big window, was gone too."
The book makes you stop and think about how much we rely on technology and the internet just to get through our daily lives. Life has changed so much because of it and it would alter immeasurably again if it was suddenly taken away from us. Would that be an altogether bad thing? We're all so used to being able to use Google to quickly find information; we use Twitter and Facebook to interact with each other and keep in touch. Imagine what it would be like if that all went away tomorrow.
The setting of the novel is a particular success. The hotel feels almost like a character within the story. In fact, I would have enjoyed more of an exploration of this. We find out that the hotel is famous for a number of suicides having taken place there and it once played host to a serial killer. Some of the characters feel they are there for a reason, like fate drew them to this place. There is an underlying, sinister malevolence to the hotel which puts the reader in mind, of course, of the Overlook hotel in The Shining. How Jameson resisted the urge to locate one of her guests in room 237 is beyond me! I can see how there might be a sequel or - of more interest to me - a prequel. There is certainly scope for it if the author ever felt like revisiting aspects of the story. I think it would be interesting to explore events at other times during the lifespan of the hotel. I'm not sure I need to know what happens next to Jon and the others. I like open endings that leave you to imagine what might come next.
There is one section of the book which comes towards the end of the novel which I must mention. It talks about one of the character's fear of open water and, specifically, large things in the ocean. This is a fear I can relate to. I can't stand not being able to touch the bottom, whether I'm in the sea or a swimming pool. I've never been able to quite put my finger on why (seeing Jaws as a child didn't help) or describe the way it feels. But the following extract does it perfectly and I think it's a bit of a metaphor for the way modern life makes us feel too:
"There's a word for it, megalohydrothalassophobia. Specifically, it means a fear of large things in the water. So it's not really a fear of the sea, it's fear of not knowing what's out there. It's the idea of floating somewhere where you can't see land or anything you can grab on to, in an environment you can't navigate, and where you don't know what's below you. But it could be anything, and it could be so massive, so huge, that it could swallow you whole and you wouldn't even have the perspective to see it coming. All of a sudden, the space below you would get dark, maybe for miles, and you can't see it because you're floating there, no control, you can't swim away and you're struggling for air, just trying to stay afloat and keep your head up, and then, just like that, something the size of a road, or a city, has swallowed you up."
I very much enjoyed this book. More, perhaps, than I initially thought I would. Our world seems to be facing so may problems these days. The Last made me want to explore how we might bring ourselves back from the brink. Is it too late? Are we already doomed? What can we do to make things better? So, for my next read, I'll be tackling 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari. Join me for more on that next time.
In the meantime, please don't forget to subscribe and share if you've enjoyed the Never-ending Book Story. Let me know your thoughts on The Last, too by using the comments section below. Also, remember you can find me on Twitter and Instagram.
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