This is a Must Read if you want a well-written, nuanced, thriller with an original twist on catastrophic climate change, strong, nicely paced world-building, a main character who has depth, secrets and complicated motivations, all set in set in a depressingly plausible, very British, near-future totalitarian regime that is drenched in threat, defeat, compromise and betrayal.

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I finished ‘The Last Day‘ a few weeks ago and it’s been haunting me ever since. It took me a long time to read, not because I wasn’t interested but because I found the future that Andrew Hunter Murray had created so intense and so credible and so full of dread that I could only stay in for short perio.

Why did it have such an impact?

Firstly, it’s a very British dystopia, so it felt real to me. I couldn’t distance myself from it, only picture myself in it and wonder how weak or strong I would be when surrounded by such threat and hopelessness.

Secondly, although it is a good page-turning thriller with a secret at its heart, the people unravelling the secret and the people trying to prevent them from unravelling it aren’t larger-than-life heroes or villains. There is no ex-special-forces-gone-rogue  fighting a lone but competent war against a totalitarian state. There’s just a bright, often brave, even more often frightened, woman who cannot let go of discovering what she suspects to be a dreadful truth. The people opposing her are ordinary people who have perhaps become the worst versions of themselves but who still remind me of people I’ve met and even worked with. I found this ordinariness far more disturbing than melodrama would have been.

I don’t want to give away the plot or disclose the secret at the heart of the book so, instead, I’m going to share my reactions as I read it.

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 14%

Ok, I’m hooked. The idea of the rotation of the world slowly stopping, creating one long day in which most of the world is either in permanent freezing darkness or unbearable, unending burning sunshine, with only a small sliver of land left habitable, is terrifying. It’s climate change at its most unarguable. Britain has won the climate lottery and is in the habitable twilight zone but what does that mean?

I’m intrigued by the main character, Ellen Hopper, a climate scientist out on a re-purposed North Sea oil rig, measuring ocean currents. She’s insulated from what’s happening on the mainland and she’s doing something with her skills but can already sense that she has secrets and guilt in her past and a restlessness in her present. And now she’s been called back to London…

 31% 

This is getting darker in a credibly British sort of way. The concept of ‘performance politics’ to keep a right-wing government in power is depressingly familiar.

I’m impressed by the writing which is subtle when it could so easily have been heavy-handed in its exposition.

 40% 

Reading this, I’m feeling the same dry, dusty dread I felt the first time I read ‘1984’. It comes from understanding that opposing the powerful is dangerous and probably pointless but must be done anyway. It faces ordinary people, who just want to lead their lives in peace, with the choice of compromising again and again and again until their lives shrink, their freedom is gone and they can’t face who they’ve become or taking action that is most likely pointless and doomed to failure and may endanger everyone they care about. It’s the mundane reality of totalitarianism but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing.

I don’t particularly care for Ellen Hopper but I do care about her predicament. I think that making her less engaging than your average hero is a good way of keeping the focus on what is at stake.

One of the things that bothers me most about this book is that it all feels only a step or two away from where we currently are in England.

 47% 

This is depressing. Good but even more depressing because it’s good. It’s made worse by being set in England. This is a version of England at its worst but no worse than it was during the peak of its Empire. I can see this reaction to severe climate change – the sudden and largely unopposed rise of an authoritarian regime, the privilege of a few, the fear and hunger of the many. Selfishness dressed as patriotism.

65%

The interrogation scene got to me. It’s not overly violent. Not at the start. But it’s full of dread and hopelessness and degradation.

I don’t know where this is going. The pace has picked up. The stakes are high but the ultimate goal is still unknown. I can’t see any way out of this for Hopper but I can’t see her stopping either.

100%

Wow. For once, the secret at the heart of the story wasn’t anticlimactic.

I hate the England that is being depicted here but I find it entirely credible.

I doubt the world will stop turning but I don’t doubt that we will be fighting for habitable land, food and water in the not-too-distant future. I very much hope that this is not the path England would choose.

What a book.

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