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…