‘The Last’, Hanna Jameson

I love a good apocalyptic piece of fiction, so Hanna Jameson’s ‘The Last’ naturally appealed. Our narrator, Jon Keller, is staying at a remote hotel in Switzerland while he attends an academic conference in the area (there’s always going to be trouble if academics are involved, just saying), when the news breaks that nuclear bombs have been dropped on Washington, London, and various other cities around the world. Cue the pandemonium. A lot of the guests at the hotel choose to leave, hoping that they can find some way to travel home. Jon, and a handful of other guests and staff, decide to stay at the hotel. As the book progresses, the characters discover the body of a young girl and realise that a murder has taken place. Who is the murderer? And are they still in the hotel? Jon decides to investigate, hoping to discover the truth and achieve some kind of justice for this act of violence. Though with the world that he knows crumbling around him, is such a thing as justice even possible anymore?

I wasn’t sure how the end of the world/murder mystery combo was going to work (can there really be ‘murder’ in the same way that we understand it now when basically all society has been destroyed?), but it really was effective. The murder mystery element isn’t too in your face; I was thinking it was going to be along the lines of Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’, especially with it being set somewhere so remote, but it was present enough that it added a sufficient amount of menace to the story as a whole, and threw up a couple of moral questions about what behaviours are understandable/acceptable in such a scenario and how you should deal with them.

While Jon’s investigation of this murder is one of the central plot lines, what makes this book so effective (and really quite unnerving in places) are Jon’s personal reflections and the interactions between characters as they attempt to make sense of what has happened, while continuing to try and stay alive. The emotional responses from each of them as they try to process the enormity of their situation are genuinely believable; they make you question how you would react if such a thing were to happen. My only gripe with this book is the ending. While it was satisfying in some ways- I like it when a plot comes together at the end- in others it felt a little…unbelievable? It’s as close to a happy ending as you can get in an apocalyptic story. I was expecting one last dark twist, and I guess some would argue that the final few sentences provided that final kick in the guts, but for me, it just didn’t do it. Other than that, I thought it was a gripping, well told story about the continuation of life in the face of absolute destruction, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to spend the next couple of days questioning what it means to actually be human.

Current Read: ‘Circe’, Madeline Miller