The debut novel from Bethany Clift, Last One at the Party takes a classic sci-fi trope – the sole survivor at the end of the world – and strips it back to its core, delivering a powerful, emotional story of a regular woman in a recognisable world gone wrong. In a very near future, even the lessons learned from the Coronavirus pandemic are no use when a new, horrifyingly virulent virus ravages first America and then the rest of the world. There’s no hope for a cure, yet in London one woman – the nameless protagonist here – finds herself still alive in the ruins of her life, with everyone she ever knew now dead and gone. At first she loses herself in drink, drugs, raids on Harrods and the lingering luxuries still on offer in the city, but it’s not long before loneliness compels her to seek out other survivors or, failing that, some remaining reason to keep going.
Told in first person with a straight-talking, witty and brutally honest voice, right from the beginning it feels as though the protagonist (there’s never any reason for her to use her own name) is telling her story directly to you the reader. What starts off pacy, bleak and worryingly relevant gradually develops into a thoughtful, often heartbreaking depiction of a character who’s never been able to be truly honest with herself or truly happy, who’s utterly unsuited to solo survival and yet somehow manages to become something better despite the appalling situation she’s faced with. Her matter of fact, horrifying-yet-fascinating depiction of the ‘present’ is interspersed with reflections on her life leading up to the pandemic, the two cleverly intertwining so that as she explores the lonely, painful life she’s forced to try and cope with, she also reveals more of who she was before, and why she responds to her new life the way she does.
Despite the dystopian premise, this is (if it’s not too much of a contradiction) a grounded, relatable post-apocalypse story. It’s a tale which maintains a broad appeal by keeping its focus on an everyday character and her experiences, helped by the fact that we’re all already used to a degree of bizarre, isolated life right now. There’s no attempt made to explain the hows or whys of the pandemic, or show anything beyond the perspective of this one character, and this proves absolutely the right decision. With no need to worry about the bigger picture, Clift is free to really drill down to the details of post-apocalyptic life, whether that’s the guilt of raiding abandoned shops for supplies, the dread of what might be waiting in hospitals, inside parked cars and behind closed doors – and the disgust of finding out – or the surprising dangers that surface in a world (almost) without humans.
For all the horrors though, there’s humour too – frequently black humour, in that very English way of coping with trauma by making light of it – and even a little hope, of sorts. All told it’s powerful and full of heart, transcending any restrictions of genre and using the lens of the apocalypse to tell a relatable tale of a regular person, a contemporary story of mental health struggles and the stressful demands of an ordinary life. The nature of the book and the events it portrays mean that it’s hard to handle in places, published as it is in the midst of our very own pandemic, and some of the tougher moments (some unexpectedly so) may prove too much, just that bit too close to home. Pandemic tolerance notwithstanding though, this is the sort of book that leaves you feeling hollowed out yet simultaneously lifted up, and that will live in the reader’s memory long after it’s finished.
Many thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and Bethany Clift for providing me with an advance copy of Last One at the Party in exchange for my honest review!
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