Review: 'The Last' by Hanna Jameson

As I mentioned a while back I've started to work on my review backlog and while going through my TBR on NetGalley The Last immediately popped out to me. Written before the COVID-19 pandemic, it nonetheless felt like a super timely novel that combined some social commentary with a murder mystery. Turns out The Last is a lot more than that. Thanks to Viking and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thanks also for their patience.

Pub. Date: 1/31/2019
Publisher: Penguin Books; Viking

BREAKING: Nuclear weapon detonates over Washington

BREAKING: London hit, thousands feared dead.

BREAKING: Munich and Scotland hit. World leaders call for calm.

Jon Keller was on a trip to Switzerland when the world ended. More than anything he wishes he hadn't ignored his wife Nadia's last message. Twenty people remain in Jon's hotel. Far from the nearest city, they wait, they survive.

Then one day, the body of a girl is found. It's clear she has been murdered. Which means that someone in the hotel is a killer... As paranoia descends, Jon decides to investigate.

But how far is he willing to go in pursuit of justice? And what happens if the killer doesn't want to be found?

Nuclear war is a purely human threat, unlike natural disasters like floods and earthquakes (let's set aside human involvement through climate change for a second), and because of that it is on a different level. The threat of nuclear war is the threat of a trigger-happy president or prime minister, unpredictable and sudden. It is also a threat that wanes and rises in importance. During the Cold War it was the Sword of Damocles hanging over the childhood of my parents. With the end of the Cold War came the hope that it was the end of the nuclear threat, and yet we have seen these kinds of tensions rise again and again as more and more Western governments lean towards a populist/nationalist/right-wing agenda. Hanna Jameson's The Last is defined by this tension, having been written after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. While he is not named, Trump and the ideology he unleashed figure throughout this book as the Americans at the hotel try to come to terms with their potential culpability in the end of the world. Yet it's also only one of the factors at play and Jameson wisely leaves the specific how and why of the destruction vague. Would we know the specifics, if it happened now, or would we also be in that terrifying uncertainty Jameson's characters find themselves in? I think the latter, and as such The Last definitely resonated with me.

Jon is a historian at a conference in a secluded Swiss hotel, ignoring messages and emails from his wife, when the world ends. What follows is a blur of days, filled by panic, numbness, uncertainty and death. When he decides to keep a record of the goings-on in the hotel, a kind of record of the remains of society, he seems to regain some clarity. Yet this is shattered when he and two other men find the remains of a girl in one of the water tanks who was most likely killed on the day disaster struck. And so he begins a hunt for clues and answers which, together with the rising tensions among the hotel-guests, leads to increasing paranoia and danger. While the mystery surrounding the girl is technically the impetus for Jon's searching, it is only a secondary part of this story of survival. Should they stay in the hotel? Should they leave? What's out there? And is it better or worse if they're the only one's left. The Last is a novel full of questions and only limited answers. While not every part of this novel runs equally smoothly, I was nonetheless immensely captivated.

Hanna Jameson's novel is largely dependent on the way she establishes and builds her characters. Central to this is Jon and I really adored Jameson's choice to have him "write" the novel. In his "record" he interviews other guests, searches the hotel, and ventures beyond its walls, each time expanding the reader's understanding of this world a little further. Jon's narration is relatively self-aware, in that he is aware of his role as "documenter". His drive to be honest leads to some unflattering comments about himself, but also to a sense of urgency and has the effect that the reader feels equally unsure and paranoid. We get to know the other characters through Jon's narration which means it naturally biased. Not all of these characters feel equally fleshed out and I don't know whether that was intentional, as Jon is biased, or whether some simply weren't properly developed. I was wavering on what to rate this book. I don't do half "points" but this felt like a 3.5 to me for a variety of reasons. I really enjoyed it, the characters were interesting, and a lot of the points the book raised really intrigued me. But it left me feeling a little underwhelmed by the end, as if some points had not been fully resolved or resolved in a way that belied the tone of the rest of the book. Especially the mystery of the dead girl feels a little unstable, in the sense that it is sometimes the most important thing and at other times completely falls away. By the end, I hardly cared whether it was resolved, only to be a bit nonplussed by the way it suddenly was. But Jameson definitely had me gripped, so I will be looking for other books by her in the future.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

The Last is a novel of isolation and paranoia at the end of the world. Jameson tracks the way society crumbles and the ways it tries to keep itself afloat. While not all of it is a hit, most of it is intruiging.