So let’s make a party that no one has ever experienced
Well, someone will survive the party, one person – once a music journalist, today an insurance lady. Her orderly, petty-bourgeois world has just ended, she has no husband, no friends, no parents, and no childhood buddy. Besides, there is no one else, only empty streets and corpses slowly decaying in the apartments. What is actually done in such a situation?
A party, you know. There is still electricity, you can find miracles in store refrigerators, and the shelves in liquor stores are a real treasury. Not to mention the pharmacies – whatever used to be prescription and illegal now simply belongs to the only survivor. You just have to find the finish line and long live the ball!
The heroine of The Last One at the party is not brave or resourceful, she tries to cope with the end of the world the way a civilized bourgeois reacts to most problems – to reset herself on the most final Friday on Earth. It is easy to understand in all of this, even if we ourselves hope we would have done otherwise. At least on a smaller scale. After all, we are looking at a great wake after a whole, probably quite successful, life.
Hell is others
It will slowly become apparent that before the plague it was not so good again. Harassment, boredom and unfulfilling at work, at home the necessity to be perfect for a husband. Big Love? Apparently, although I doubt it. Maybe at least a great friendship? And not necessarily. In short, the heroine and narrator of this diary gradually realizes how much she screwed up. How bad it was for her to be surrounded by all those people who always expected something, wanted something, and set norms and rules. Now she can finally walk without makeup in her old tracksuits.
In terms of socio-psychological diagnosis, Bethany Clift’s book is… naive. We can blame it on the problems of the narrator, whose level of self-awareness and self-responsibility would terrify many hamsters. Even Bridget Jones could have dealt with the destruction of humanity better; she would certainly serve the reader less repression, and her interpersonal relationships would indeed be based on positive emotions. As you can hear, I quickly lost my sympathy for the only surviving British girl and I arrived at the end of the book solely as a result of my duty as a reviewer.
There must be a new beginning
The last one at the party very quickly stops telling about life after the disappearance of all people, but instead turns to remembering the ugly corpo and the façade relationship of the heroine. The narrator recalls lunches, business meetings, the slow breakdown of marriage and family ties. We are dealing here with a passive leading figure, a person without qualities, for whom all decisions are made by others – so they are to blame for the terrible quality of her life. Is this what we are looking for in post-apo? I certainly do not.
By the end of the book, even our party chick has to start to embrace and organize our lives somehow. The collapse of the civilized world will start to resemble agritourism away from all those nasty people who imposed their will on the heroine. But that’s not all! You are in for a hyperdramatic discovery and life-threatening situations and great heroism. Because there was a change… I don’t want to spoof, but in the end of the novel, Clift uses all the clichés associated with man-made literature. It does not say anything new about being a human or a woman.
Perhaps opting for the first-person narrative was the writer’s mistake, because she could not distance herself from the limitations and naivety of her heroine. Or maybe that’s the message – this girl is right in her assessment of life before human extinction. The book does not give us grounds to believe otherwise, so I will stop at this diagnosis without adding redundant interpretations to the text. Clift uses the post-apo genre so that her narrator can take a vacation from everyone and discover herself in a way that is devoid of distance and humor. Better to watch 28 days later , at least you will feel the British vibe there.
