The Last Day. By Andrew Hunter Murray. Dutton. $27.
Dystopias are a dime a dozen these days,
and “ribbon world” novels, while not quite that
common, are scarcely altogether new: Isaac Asimov coined the phrase nearly 70
years ago to describe a non-rotating planet “where the two halves face the
monotonous extremes of heat and cold, while the region of possible life is the
girdling ribbon of the twilight zone.” Until the mid-1960s, our own solar
system’s Mercury was believed to be a ribbon world – a clever Larry Niven story
called The Coldest Place leads
readers to believe the title refers to Pluto until, at the end, it is revealed
that the reference is to the “dark side” of Mercury (although it is now known
that Mercury does rotate). But what if
Earth became a ribbon world? How
could that happen, and why, and what would the consequences be? Well, Andrew
Hunter Murray’s debut novel, The Last
Day, is light on the how and why, but this cinematically paced adventure
thriller is all about the consequences – to humanity in general and,
specifically, to protagonist Ellen Hopper and the people in her, so to speak,
orbit.
Murray is not particularly interested in
the scientific consequences of the so-called Stop, which is just as well: in
fact, it is likely that extremes of climate would be mitigated by thermal recirculation as wind and water carried
warmed and chilled air and water across the boundaries between the sun-facing
and opposite sides of the planet. That would not suit Murray’s “ultimate
disaster” approach, though, so what he gives readers is a world with
tremendously reduced population, vastly lowered fertility (affecting humans as
well as nonhuman fauna and flora), and the inevitable vicious dictatorship
determined to protect its realm (which happens to be Great Britain, more or
less) by keeping out whatever remaining masses of unfortunate humans may try to
escape sure death by boiling or freezing (a clear sociopolitical stab at
anti-immigrant forces on our non-ribboned Earth).
Really, the setup is nothing special: Hopper is a scientist with a heart,
who has been driven by personal life experiences to work in lonely
circumstances on an offshore rig that searches for long-sunk ships and their
long-dead passengers for reasons that are not altogether clear. She suddenly
gets a mysterious visit from two sinister government types. That happens after
she receives and then destroys a letter from her former tutor, a onetime
political bigwig who fell afoul of the aforementioned dictatorship after
helping it gain traction and now, nearing his life’s end, is determined to
re-connect with his recalcitrant student for unspecified reasons and reveal to her,
and only to her, some sort of
momentous and possibly world-changing secret – even though the two of them
scarcely parted amicably. The sinister types, also after whatever the secret
is, get Hopper to her dying tutor’s bedside just barely in time for him to die
without revealing whatever-it-is to her – but just in time for him to whisper, croakily, what may be a clue.
Described this way, the plot is simply silly, not to mention a repeat of
endless thriller/mystery plots by an unending succession of writers. And this
is scarcely the only formulaic element: there is the usual government
infestation of (what remains of) the news media, and there is a nefarious
attempt to obtain nuclear weapons because the world isn’t wrecked enough yet to
satisfy the power-mad ultra-villains who always show up in tales like this one.
But Murray, despite all the clichés with which he liberally sprinkles The Last Day, keeps matters interesting
in several ways. For one thing, he has a talent for descriptive passages when
he pauses long enough in the action to employ it. Thus, when Hopper
re-experiences London after being brought there from the offshore rig, Murray
writes, “London smelled of tar. She had forgotten that. The same pollution, she
guessed, the same industrial works belching out poison as when she had left.
The air was thick with it: a warm oiliness pervading the air, almost visible, a
thick yellow blanket lying on the city. It made its way everywhere: into the
pores, into the deepest recesses of the lungs, between clothing and skin,
creeping thick and hot, industrial and intimate.” But there are not enough of
these well-crafted passages to make up for quite a few instances of inelegance
and plot holes. Why, for example, do so many people smoke cigarettes, and why,
with such enormously constrained resources, does tobacco farming seem to get
such a high priority, making cigarettes both ubiquitous and inexpensive? After
all, this is a world of “shortage, shortage, shortage; shortages of food, of
water, of fuel, of sleep, of levity, of decency.” But not of tobacco.
A bigger question, though, and one far more central to the issue of
whether readers will enjoy Murray’s novel, is why anyone should really care
about Hopper as a protagonist – that is, what makes her special. Yes, she has
the usual bruised background: part of the plot involves the possible rekindling
of romance between her and her ex-husband; another part has her still trying to
cope with her mother’s long-ago death. And yes, she has basically good
instincts that stand in stark contrast to the basically evil ones of the
one-dimensional villains on whom she gets the goods, or some of the goods. But
she is not an especially fully formed character herself – she is simply the
necessary linchpin of a story that, typically for the dystopian genre, paints
the horrors of an imagined near-future with broad strokes and then brings them
into sharp focus by showing their effect on one particular individual who,
really, just wants to find a way to cope with life and keep getting by. Hopper
is admirable in all the right ways: she is challenged to do the right thing in circumstances
that test her feelings and beliefs but that readers will know will not stop her
from ultimately doing what needs to be done. Supposedly very smart, she is flat-out
stupid in all the usual ways of an in-over-her-head protagonist, behaving with
incredible idiocy by blithely endangering numerous other people (who, as a
result, have a habit of turning up dead) as she determinedly operates entirely within
her voluminous lack of knowledge even when help is available. “I know you don’t
give a toss about any of us,” her brother says after she appears thoroughly to
have frightened him and undermined his hospitality through her selfish
thoughtlessness; and whatever his true motivations may be, this particular
statement is exactly correct. And her ex tells her at one point, “People are
dying, and you’re running around in the middle of it without a clue. …This
whole sick island is a madhouse, and everyone I know is fighting two wars,
because nobody knows who’s on whose side anymore, and here you come, just
wandering into the middle of it explaining how perfectly simple it all is.” Well, yes – that too is exactly correct. But this
is an area where Murray’s inexperience as a novelist shows, because, having
raised what could be a central issue that would produce much more insight into
Hopper’s personality and motivations, he promptly abandons the whole matter as being
out of keeping with the novel’s focus, and the improbable but so-important
quest continues apace.
If Hopper were more thoroughly fleshed-out as a character, The Last Day would be a more compelling
and more thoughtful book than it actually is. Instead, what Murray offers is a
well-paced, generally well-written near-future novel with a manifest absurdity
at its center – an absurdity intended to show that human venality and heroism
alike will both find ways to emerge even in the face of whole-Earth disasters.
The book is a quick and satisfying read as a thriller, considerably less
satisfying as a work of science fiction, and still less so as an exploration of
human frailties and capabilities. It works well for what it is, so long as
readers do not hope for it to be anything more.
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