The Last One by Alexandra Oliva
My rating: 4/5 cats
“It’s all just part of the game. As long as I keep that in mind, I’ll be fine, no matter how twisted things get.
famous last words, man…
this book was so, so fun, and i had such a great time reading it, but the fact that some people i usually agree with did not means i gotta write one of those probably-only-interesting-to-me reviews to work out what i loved about it without giving too much away because spoiler police.
the premise is shivery-good: twelve individuals are selected to be contestants on the premiere season of a survival-themed reality series shrouded in secrecy, with a feature-film-sized budget, and a near-simultaneous film-to-broadcast time, three episodes a week. many of the specifics and details are withheld from the contestants, including the true name of the show itself. they know only that it will require woodsy survival skills, strategy, endurance, and, it soon becomes clear, there will be an element of theatricality.
three weeks into filming, with episodes already airing, and while the remaining contestants are scattered apart from each other into individual challenges, there is a global pandemic and while the world doesn’t end, shit is really, really bad, communications are compromised, and one of the contestants, nicknamed ‘zoo,’ is on her own, off-course and unreachable and making her way through an increasingly ruined wasteland she believes to be part of the show; encountering corpses she assumes are props, following what she perceives to be clues, but in reality, she’s just witnessing what the world looks like when it dies.
believing she is still being monitored by hidden cameras and drones, zoo doesn’t comprehend the gravity of her situation – she assumes she still has a safety net – an “out” if she needs one; that the crew won’t let her die or get into any real danger, despite the very real and very dangerous situations in which she keeps finding herself. not that she’s planning on taking advantage of that safety net:
Nothing can be worse than what they’ve already put me through. I’d never choose this, not again. But I’m here and I’m a woman of my word and I promised myself I wouldn’t quit.
it’s a fascinating situation, psychologically, considering the tricksy mindgames reality television plays even when there’s not an apocalypse going on, where viewers are complicit in their own manipulation for entertainment – required to accept a semblance of reality with the tacit understanding that the ‘reality’ is largely fabricated, as one character observes before all the real bad begins:
Though he will not admit as much, the cameraman’s presence gave him the courage to head off into the woods alone. It’s only pretend alone, he thinks.
and as zoo herself acknowledges (unfortunately and unknowingly after the real bad begins):
The world in which I now move is a deliberate human perversion of nature’s beauty. I cannot forget this. I must accept this. I have accepted this.
it’s a premise so rich with opportunities for psychological exploration and social commentary, and oliva does an excellent job taking advantage of these opportunities. the narrative switches back and forth in time between the show before the event; setting up characters and challenges and motivations, and to zoo on her own, afterwards, in the changed world, maintaining her persona, adapting her behavior for the viewer who is no longer there, trusting her life to a set of rules no longer in place.
that is some scary shit, man.
quick personal fact that may or may not be interesting or relevant – i have never watched survivor or any of those shows i have seen commercials for where people are tossed naked into the woods or made to eat unusual things or dropped from high buildings for cash prizes. so, how well this book reflects or references those shows is lost on me. but even though i’ve never personally witnessed this kind of situation on the teevee, i understand the psychological strain inherent in this arrangement – how the presence of the camera and the unseen audience affects behavior, constructs personas as armor, and how the editing of raw footage influences and manipulates people into caricatures of themselves. within the book, characters are referenced by nicknames, reduced to roles based on their professions or skills: “banker,” “asian chick” (who later gets upgraded to “carpenter chick”), “cheerleader boy,” etc., which annoyed some readers, but i kind of liked it (since with the reality game shows i do watch, like project runway and top chef, this is exactly what i do – when there’s too many of them to keep track of at first and you gotta differentiate them by their salient characteristics – affected or not). here, it drives the point home that these people (theeeeese peeeeeople) have been reduced to stereotypes, pigeonholed into roles to fulfill an audience’s expectations and whatever doesn’t fit into this role is edited away as though it never happened. the contestant’s real names are occasionally used when they form bonds, or in the outside world as fans of the show/friends of the contestants gather in a chat room to dish, and it’s a little confusing, but it’s also kind of a fun game, being exposed to the personalities of these contestants in their “day lives” and contrasting them with their “show lives.”
it’s a very strong debut. there are a couple of weak parts and a bit of a three-quarter mark slump, but it held my interest and there are some terrifically intense scenes that will stick with me.
the quibbles are minor, and not uncommon – authorial choices made to maximize dramatic impact that come across as improbable (including my own personal bugbear involving communication, aka “if this one character says this one wicked important thing they don’t really have reason not to say and which is only not being said in order to prolong a dramatic situation” syndrome) although to be fair, i think it is handled better here than is typical. there are some extenuating circumstances. but still – just say that thing, son!
there are some additional plausibility issues, where you’re desperate for zoo’s penny to drop and see what’s really going on around her, particularly in the blue cabin, but it’s also perfectly reasonable that she simply wouldn’t be able to process the truth of what she’s seeing considering the completely dissociative state brought on by the strain of hunger and dehydration and View Spoiler », and the general psychological toll of being alone in the wilderness for an extended period of time, exhausted from maintaining a persona that’s an amplification of who she really is for an audience that is no longer watching, “trained” by previous legitimate challenges that seemed over-the-top even in the earlier stages of the game:
“I think from this point on we need to assume this is for real,” says Black Doctor. At Tracker’s incredulously lifted brow he adds, “Just in case.”
her rationalization of truly horrifying situations is justified, considering her experiences, but it doesn’t mean you don’t want to smack some sense into her and say “open your eyes woman! you are not safe here!”
but minor complaints only, outweighed by what was clearly some solid research into wilderness survival, nature and animal facts, the allure of watching reality shows, even when you know better:
…I have to admit, if I weren’t here, if I weren’t a contestant, I’d watch this show. I’d soak in their vision of mangled familiarity, and I’d love it.
and the mechanics of creating these shows, where even minor scenes like this were fascinating to me:
She’s searching the base for a hole. It takes her eight seconds to find. All eight seconds will be shown, and viewers will feel like she’s failing, like she’s taking forever, because they’re used to scenes like this being shortened. From Zoo and Tracker’s perspective she finds the metal box very quickly.
so, yeah, i really enjoyed this book, even though i can understand why others would not.
but i wouldn’t be me if i didn’t bitch about the blurb readalikes a little. i’ve never read The Passage, so i can’t speak to that one, but the comparison to Station Eleven is sacrificing accuracy for name-recognition. my takeaway from Station Eleven was along the lines of “what remains to define humanity when everything is gone? what do we choose to hold onto/what can we hold onto/what endures??” and it’s a wide-angled story encompassing the entire human experience through several small individual lenses.
this … ain’t that. this might be the exact opposite of that, where the loss of humanity is experienced through one individual’s flawed perspective; where her determination to ‘survive’ isn’t necessarily heroic or a tribute to our indomitable species, but down to her sheer stubbornness to win a game. the focus isn’t one of breadth – it is tied up completely in issues more immediate and contemporary; media studies and psychology and ptsd and how we relate to those around us and what we have been trained to show or conceal, and it is way more concerned with individual experiences, where the concept of ‘humanity’ exists only as an abstract, a faceless and unseen observer; a powerless god.
this doesn’t make one ‘better’ than the other, i just think it’s important to make accurate comparisons for the sake of the reader who may be expecting a completely different message or focus. but yeah, if you want to be reductive about it – in both books, a plague ends the world as we know it. so i guess this book is also just like The Stand and The Decameron. <— cranky readers’ advisory snark for which i apologize.
to be fair, the first chapter of this book does have some structural similarities to the beginning of Station Eleven, but that’s not enough for readalike status.
this book may be a bit more commercial than Station Eleven and it is a debut, with some room for technical improvements, but oh lordy, did i love it. i suspect this one will split readers into love/hate camps, but i am on the side of love.
even just for this fairly inconsequential anecdote, because it is also MY dream to have a chipmunk scamper on me and now i know i am not alone:
I’ve never been fond of squirrels; I prefer chipmunks with their racing stripes. When I was six or seven I spent an entire summer prone among the maples and birches behind my parents’ house, hoping a chipmunk would mistake me for a log. I wanted so badly to know the feel of his little feet on my skin. That never happened, but once one did scamper close, until we were eye-to-eye. And then he sneezed in my face and disappeared. Like a magic trick, I told my husband on our first date. Poof. A story I’ve told so many times I no longer know if it’s true.
okay, i think i’ve worked through what i liked about this book.
tl;dr – chipmunks.
