The Last of Us by Rob Ewing
The Borough Press, 21st April 2016
E-book, 320pp
*My copy came from the publisher via Netgalley
A quick, darting review today, in lieu of my second April wrap up post. We had a lovely display from The Borough Press at work in the library recently, and multiple copies of Rob Ewing's debut novel stacked for people to borrow. It reminded me that I had a proof sitting on my Kindle, idling it's engine and waiting for the moment when I would be in the mood for a book described as The Lord of the Flies meets Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. Well the sun is shining, the birds are singing, I thought, no time like the present to embark on a devastatingly dark dystopian novel set on a remote Scottish island. I gorged it in two sittings and a single day. It's compulsively readable and I absolutely could not sleep until I had laid the child protagonists to rest.
Our narrator Rona is 8 or 9 years old, the middle 'sibling' of a strange adopted family. She lives on an otherwise deserted island with little Alex, who is five, and big girl Elizabeth, who at eleven might be the oldest living person in the world. They follow a set of non-negotiable rules - only drink the sterilised water, smell food before you eat it, always carry your whistle for emergencies - and try to carry on living the way they did before it happened. They walk to school each day, where they are joined by the only two other survivors, brothers Calum Ian and Duncan, and go over the same pages of their school textbooks. They go to the playground, watch DVDs on an old portable battery powered player they found and go shopping. They have exhausted most of the 'old shopping' - the Co-Op and the post office are mostly empty - but there is still plenty of 'new shopping'. They explore house after house in the village, taking what they need. For old time's sake they knock before they go in. It isn't too bad, although sometimes a house is bad. Bad houses have a smell, maybe a dead dog or cat, too often a dead person.
Rona only has a child's bare bones knowledge of what happened to her mum and all the other adults. She knows that people started to get sick around last Christmas time; that at first there were ambulances, hospital treatment, people in face masks and white suits. Later there were emergency centres for the growing number of cases, road blocks and food shortages, rising panic. Eventually there were just dead people, some in body bags, others just left to rot where they fell. The school gym, the community centre are now fly-infested mausoleums. As far as Rona and the other children know they are the only survivors. Terribly scarred by the mystery illness and left for dead, they are waiting in hope of being found. Both Rona and the brothers are clinging to a belief that their parents survived and escaped; Elizabeth and Alex know that theirs are dead, have seen their slack blackened faces.
The comparison to The Lord of the Flies is only valid insofar as The Last of Us is about what might happen if five children found themselves alone on a deserted island. Using only their limited understanding and their sometimes flawed reasoning they have to work out how to live together and deal with what has happened to them as best as they can. Although Ewing doesn't shy away from how difficult and challenging this is - as you would expected, all the children are deeply traumatised - his isn't a novel about the savagery of youth or the victory of the id over the veneer of civilisation. Taking their cue from Elizabeth, whose constant refrain is "What will work? Teamwork", Rona and the others try to do what is best for one another. They share, they are kind, they reassure and comfort one another. They have maintained some of the rituals and values of their parents, internalising all those occasions they have been told to treat other people as you would like to be treated or if they have nothing nice to say, they shouldn't say anything at all.
Of course anger, silliness, hurt do get the better of them sooner or later, leading to acts of betrayal and damage that in adults would look like terrible melodrama but in children ring true. It is a chain of such events that powers the propulsive plot of the book, beginning with a thoughtless act of selfishness that threatens to destroy the equilibrium that Elizabeth has built. Calum Ian and Duncan steal a prized tin of hot-dogs from Rona and Alex and later that day, buzzing with righteous indignation, Rona breaks into their house, takes a digital camera of photographs of their family and erases them all. In the moment she doesn't realise the terrible implications of what she has done, or the disproportion in her retaliation. It is only afterwards that she begins to understand what she has stolen.
Child narrators are difficult animals, and Rona is no different. Despite Ewing's attempt to capture some of the disconnect and fragmentation of her nine-year old voice, her focus on cause and effect and on the feelings of others serves the workings of the narrative more than her realism. Occasionally the dialogue is twee: Alex speaks in truncated babyish sentences, except where it needs to be otherwise, and Calum Ian has more articulacy in anger than your average ten year old boy. There isn't always balance between the children's reasonable fear of danger and death and their madcap ideas for being saved.
Still in spite of this, the claustrophobia of the island setting and the unpredictability of the actors make The Last of Us desperately compelling. As Rona takes us deeper and deeper into the extremity of their situation, beginning to unpick her memories of her mother and what happened during the epidemic, it is impossible not to engage emotionally. What could be more horrifying then being surrounded by the remnants of all the people that you knew and spoke to, not knowing if you are all that's left to show for human kind? Ewing is mostly successful in spinning out how this scenario might lay siege to a young mind, eroding their memories and niceties, threatening the viability of a future. What kind of new world would Rona and her friends build as adults, carrying around the knowledge of what they have seen and the loss of almost everything they have loved?
~~Victoria~~