It’s the end of the world as we know it and the unnamed narrator of Last One at the Party by Bethany Clift feels fine, physically, at least — emotionally, not so much.
As far as she knows, the entire human race has been wiped out by the 6DM virus — short for Six Days Maximum — the longest you have to live before your body destroys itself. The virus began, we are told, not in China or some tiny Africa village, but in Kansas. This often blackly funny, terrifying and convincing book is the transcript of her diary that she begins writing in December 2023.
According to World Reading Habits in 2020, a study published by Global English Editing, lockdowns helped people rediscover the magic of reading. Predictably, romance remained the genre of choice. However, dystopian fiction, offering a vision of the future in which societies are in cataclysmic decline and characters battle uncontrollable disease, came into its own in 2020.
Around the world, people found catharsis in apocalyptic novels reflecting our precarious reality. We flocked to Stephen King’s 1,200-page behemoth The Stand, originally published in 1978, about a particularly deadly and rather gross strain of influenza. We returned to Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, my favourite book of 2014, which portrayed art as providing purpose, and injecting continuity and permanence into a terrifying world.
Inevitably, we looked to The Plague, Albert Camus’s 1947 masterpiece, in which the citizens of Oran become prisoners of an epidemic when their city falls under total quarantine. The novel questions whether they were really “free”, or truly alive, before the plague, given their unconscious enslavement to their habits. It is only when they are quarantined and separated from their friends, families and lovers that they most intensively love the people they simply took for granted. Sound familiar?
But let us now return to the only living girl in the world. A Londoner in her mid-30s, she is no Ellen Ripley, and therein lies much of the joy and dark humour of this tale. There are no mad scientists, not a fascist government in sight, not a single flesh-eating frothing zombie to be found. Instead, our protagonist is the most impractical, irrational sole survivor you could ever imagine. If her erstwhile friends had asked her to go camping, top on her list of things she’d need would have been new friends.
Clift, who remarkably wrote the novel before the pandemic had ever been heard of, sets out to interrogate the decisions taken by the narrator, who is completely unsuited to the task and has no skills that will help her cope, on how to survive. A writer in her previous life, her diary is unedited and bluntly honest. She tries to find ways to make things better, because no-one wants to feel alone and without hope. At first, she copes so incredibly badly that one cannot be blamed for thinking she’s going to end up dead in a bed somewhere.
But this is not a book about death; it’s not even about pandemics — it is a story about survival. She begins her journey by going on a month-long drug and alcohol binge that seems like a sensible thing to do when you don’t have to go to work the next day. She also raids Harrods frequently.
I burst into hysterical tears. I wept for the internet and my last connection to my past.
When the electrical grid finally breaks down, she realises no more internet means no more daily checks of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. No more reading old e-mails or flicking through photos on the cloud.
“I burst into hysterical tears. I wept for the internet and my last connection to my past. I wept for hot tea and hot showers and hot food and central heating and cold beer and TV and music and disco lights and hot tubs on the roof and all of the things that I could no longer have. I wept for the home that I had made for myself that had been easy and warm and cocooned from the horrors outside. I wept for the loss of my cosy post-apocalyptic life. I wept because I was frightened to go outside and face this new, dark world.”
It is also at that moment that she begins to question her relationship with painkiller Tramadol, and the realisation hits her that the house she has been living in is an absolute mess. The horror of her situation overwhelms her. She procures a Porsche (one in a series of impractical vehicles she chooses to drive) and decides to head north. Just as she’s about to leave, she finds a bag-of-bones dog, a golden retriever no less — which is good because, according to the American Kennel Cub, dogs make us feel less alone.
She sets out on her road trip and starts to disclose more about her past through a series of often hilarious, sometimes unfortunate flashbacks. We learn that she wasn’t always true to herself, or to others. Imprisoned for much of her life by her perceived inadequacies, and unable to reject the stereotypes that women find themselves trapped by, especially in the age of social media, she had much in common with the citizens of Camus’s Oran, often letting down those closest to her.
In the midst of her isolation, she accepts past mistakes and comes to the realisation that life must go on. With no Indiana Jones in sight, she learns new skills to survive, and that is what makes this novel a refreshing and original debut. Much dystopian fiction features male protagonists, but in our narrator, we have an “everywoman” who evolves into a strong female character that is honest and has no desire any longer to be what she is not. To quote Camus: “Once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.”
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