a gallimaufry

The Last Murder at the End of the World, by Stuart Turton

Having – is ‘enjoyed’ really the right word? ‘admired and been so wound up by I could not put it down’ is a better description – Stuart Turton’s first novel, The Seven Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, there was absolutely no way I could walk past The Last Murder at the End of the World when I spotted it in our library.

Both books are detective novels, very much in the Golden Age tradition – but with added existentialism, which piles on the sense of urgency. The Last Murder is set in a post-apocalyptic future – no! Wait! Don’t let that put you off! It’s set in a village on an island. Much of the village is in a former military barracks, but the villagers have painted bright flowers and animals over the crumbling concrete, planted old jeeps with flowers and converted an old radar dish into a bird bath. In the mornings, they work in the service of the village – farming, fishing, teaching. In the afternoons and evenings they rest, eat communally, perform entertainments for each other. It all seems a pretty idyllic existence, if simple and with limited medical resources. (Worryingly, books are in short supply and seem to be mainly Sherlock Holmes stories.)

(And there is a map! Always a bonus. From here)

However, this is the last outpost of humanity. On the horizon hums a fog of insects which kills everything it touches and which has destroyed the rest of the earth. Only the island’s emitters keep them at bay. Other not so fun facts: the climate is hot, there’s a nightly curfew and everybody dies in their sleep the night they turn sixty. Despite this, the villages seem content – except perhaps Emory, who doesn’t seem to be good at anything except asking annoying questions.

Then someone is murdered, triggering the switching off of the emitters and the gradual encroachment of the fog. Emory has 107 hours to solve the murder before the insects cover the island and kill everything on it. That’s a bit more pressure than Poirot generally faces.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the most curious thing about this novel, and that’s the narrating voice. Abi is an entity who can see into everyone’s minds. She is described at one point as a sort of communal conscience, but she’s also a security system. When a villager is upset or angry, she can reason with them, talk them out of destructive or hurtful behaviour. She too works in service to the common good. But she wipes everyone’s memories of the night of the murder, so that even the killer doesn’t know they’re guilty. Why has she done this?

What makes this novel so clever therefore is that, on one level, we’re with Emory, racing against time to save her island. On another, we’re trying to work out what Abi is and why she is, because this explains the what and the why of this society’s existence. And the further we go, the more moral questions are thrown up for us to consider.

I can’t really write any more than this because working things out is one of the joys of the book, of course, and I don’t want to spoil that for you if you haven’t read it yet. Can I use the word ‘metafictional’ without being pretentious? Because yes, this is. Other joys: the richly imagined island world, the characters who are genuinely trying to do their best for each other, the sense of a quasi-communist society which seems rather pleasant, questions about memory and history, about power and benevolence. The big surprise? Finding halfway of so through the novel that you would prefer humans to become extinct…

 

Salem Chapel, by Margaret Oliphant

Well, my cunning plan for monthly reading round-ups has obviously failed, so it’s back to traditional reviews for me for now. The main problem is that at the end of each month I’d forgotten what I’d read and anything interesting I might have thought about it. Make notes, Helen? Perhaps I will. Perhaps that can be my new year’s resolution.

I only finished Salem Chapel a few days ago so I can at least vaguely remember it... It’s a slightly odd novel, imagine if Barchester Towers was walking down the street and was suddenly assailed by East Lynne and you might have an idea. Peopled with the kind of full-blooded characters, from Mr Tozer, the dependable butterman and deacon, to Adelaide Tufton, the acerbic and relentlessly curious invalid, that I delight in a Victorian novel, it does become a page-turner when the melodramatic subplot gets going and I stayed up late anxious to find out what happened...

Fresh from theological college, John Vincent arrives in Carlingford as the new Dissenting minister for Salem Chapel. Brimful of idealism, he sees himself tending to the destitute and delivering sermons so inspiring he will soon be mixing with the town’s highest echelons of society. Alas! The poor, though poor, are not quite as needy as he had anticipated and his congregation is drawn not from the upper classes but from trade. Not only are they smug about their wretchedly middle-class ways, but they expect him to participate in their endless tea meetings and pay them social calls as well. Vincent pleases them by preaching so vigorously that pew subscriptions soar, but then promptly falls in love with the young dowager Lady Western, who is of the Anglican persuasion. Mrs Tozer, Mrs Pigeon and Mrs Brown all heartily disapprove of young men chasing ladies above their station (especially when there are unmarried Tozer and Pigeon daughters around) and so Vincent quickly loses his bloom and finds himself struggling to retain the confidence of his congregation – who pay his wages and therefore call the shots. Respectability and value for money are both highly prized in Salem Chapel, and mooning after Lady Western casts doubt on whether the new minister represents either of those ideals. Vincent, certain of his superiority to the cheesemongers and greengrocers of his flock, is blind to his danger.

An anomaly among the Salem Chapel worshippers is Mrs Hilyard, a thin, sardonic woman with a secret past and an endless pile of sewing. And far away in Lonsdale, a mysterious gentleman begins to court Susan, Vincent’s beautiful sister. Could there be a connection here? Reader, there most assuredly is – and thus the sensation part of the novel bursts in.

According to Penelope Fitzgerald, who wrote the excellent introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition, Margaret Oliphant (a widow with three children to feed) seems to have introduced the sensation plot in order to increase sales, but was herself unsure of it. Beside the acute observations of Carlingford life, and the wonderfully drawn characters – the Tozers, Mrs Vincent, Lady Western – the sensation plot does come over as histrionic peopled with cardboard figures. Nevertheless, its unnaturalness does reflect the feeling, when something so terrible happens, that it is all a nightmare, unreal, discombobulating. And although it might be artistically weaker than the realist novel into which it irrupts, it does raise the stakes and make for compulsive reading, while testing Vincent and the chapel-goers and finding them, in their different ways, wanting.

The very extremity of the crisis somehow points up the ridiculous binaries that govern everyday life. It excites the prurience of Carlingford but, conveyed to them principally through the newspapers, does not belong to everyday life and fails to awaken their empathy. Far from rallying to their embattled minister, they chafe at his absences and failure to place them above his own family.

Oliphant uses the drama to point up the hypocrisies of Victorian society in general and the cruel double standards that existed against women. And yet,while the men have power and freedom and so delightfully prefer death to dishonour for their womenfolk, the female characters are not without resource. They wield the soft power within their community and, when the chips are down, avenge and escape without male assistance. Even the self-deprecating Phoebe has her eye on the main chance. As Tozer, endlessly politicking but outmanoeuvred by Mrs Pigeon, says, ‘it’s all along of the women, sir – it’s them as is at the bottom of all the mischief in a flock.’

(Portrait of Margaret Oliphant by Frederick Sandys, 1881, thus almost twenty years after she wrote Salem Chapel; National Portrait Gallery; found here)