THE LAST
Hanna Jameson
Penguin Random House - Viking
400 pages
As seen on most of the
apocalyptic stories published in the last few years, ‘The Last’ starts at the
same time the disaster happens. The countdown to the known world speed up and
the characters in the story will have to survive nonetheless. And despite themselves.
This initial event use to have
different interpretations depending on writer’s origins or concerns. An infection
expanding around the world is quite common as seen on a never ending list of
zombie tales published in the last decade. There are also some authors who have
opted for an alien invasion or an increase on the sea water level. In this case
we also have one of the clichés on catastrophic literature: a nuclear attack.
What if most of the countries decide to attack one each other by using nuclear
bombs? What if all network is lost and you lose track of what is going on far
from what you can see with your own eyes?
Hanna Jameson locates the novel
in Switzerland, where Jon Keller is attending a business event in a hotel far
from civilization. While having breakfast, news about nuclear bombs falling in
the main cities – London, Washington, etc, start to appear on television and
mobile devices. Soon the network stop working and ignorance spreads out into
the people left in the hotel. Uncertainty increases when Jon finds a little girl
corpse in a water tank on the roof. During the first few days without updates
from out there some of the clients try to escape from the hotel, searching for
an exit to an unknown technological isolation. No further news come from those ‘brave’
ones.
‘The Last’ has an attractive structure at the
beginning in order to engage with you from the very first page. It is written
as a diary where Jon Keller himself starts writing very short chapters, with
very few information about what is happening. He does not know how long this
situation will last so he draft most of this parts. And we, as reader, will feel
what is being in a desperate condition. Therefore, the first third of the book
will be read in a sigh.
From day 50 after the initial
event, Jon Keller takes more time to explain what is going on. Chapters are
transformed into more detailed explanation of the events happening in the
hotel. This allows the reader to know much more about the 20 people remaining
in the hotel in a better way. A mix of origins, religions, political behaviours
and points of view which is difficult to put together in order to agree some difficult
decisions. Somehow it reminded me to ‘The Fireman’, written by Joe Hill. The
good news is that Jameson does not waste hundreds of pages on this matter.
Clue by clue, Jon tries to figure
out who is the killer of the girl body found in the roof. At the same time, the
people start wondering about the world out there. There are no news, no mean of
communication, no network. And not all the people handle this in the same way.
In this tense time is when the worst of each individual comes up: political
quarrels, religions, etc. In this sense, ‘The Last’ is a very up to date novel.
The pace is slower than usual, focused on the people remaining in the hotel
rather than explaining how they are going to survive. Other worries – like food
or water, are hidden or not so present. Or, at least, not until almost the end.
One of the problems I found while
Reading ‘The Last’ is the fact that the dead body found at the beginning of the
plot is not so relevant at the end. Although it promised to be the key element
in the story, it is not. While most of the individuals in the hotel does not
care about finding the killer but surviving, Jon Keller himself sometimes feel
in the same way for a long part of the book. In addition, the solution to the main
plot in the novel is explained in a handful of pages just at the end of the
volume, which feels a bit hasty and unbelievable at some point. Just wondering
if it is because Hanna was really looking for this or because of Jon, sometimes
an unreliable narrator.
However, I have to recognize that
I could not stop reading the novel until the end. The way she treats the
isolations of this characters really took my attention. The book is not very
long – just 400 pages with big letter size, but I can´t recommend it to
experienced readers of ‘end of the world’ or mystery novels as you will feel it
does not fill enough any of those. However, I can say that this novel has a
wider audience that can really enjoy it and is a highly recommended read for
all of them as it will catch you from the very beginning.
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