The number of post-apocalyptic novels on bookshop shelves right now suggests that the reading public is hungry for the end of the world – hungry like the skrake in Last Ones Left Alive are hungry for a bite of living flesh. Skrake are humans or, at least, human bodies, infected with a virus that causes death followed by reanimation as a walking corpse with a taste for the survivors. Once they sink their teeth in, you’re doomed to become one of them, meaning that a skrake is indistinguishable from a zombie, albeit the “fast zombies” of 28 Days Later or PlayStation game The Last of Us rather than the leisurely George Romero classic model.
We meet narrator Orpen some unspecified time after a cataclysmic event known only as “the Emergency”, which is hinted to have had something to do with humanity’s rapacious habits of consumption. It’s been long enough that society has faded almost entirely, but not so long that all evidence of it has decayed: Orpen walks on roads made intermittently impassable by the eruption of trees, takes shelter in houses that hold tantalising remnants of civilisation, and follows signposts that are near-illegible with rust, as she heads across Ireland towards a place called Phoenix City, which may not even exist.
In front of her, she pushes a wheelbarrow containing Maeve, her mother’s partner; beside her trots a dog called Danger (giving rise to clunky phrases such as “Danger appears from nowhere”); and all around her is threat, either in the shape of the skrake or from unknown humans. Alternating flashback chapters fill out Orpen’s upbringing on the skrake-free island of Slanbeg, off the east coast. With only her mam and Maeve, it’s safe but hardly sheltered. They bring her up to be a survivor: a knife-throwing, skrake-grappling survivor.
Life on the island was good, Orpen knows: “I had a home and I was loved and that was really fucking obvious even if everything else was a mystery.” But it wasn’t enough. From the “ghost village” on the island, she scavenges bits of knowledge about the Emergency: rotting newspapers and fragments of posters offer tantalising hints of “strongholds” and something called “Banshees” that are apparently “fighting for you”. However much mam and Maeve warn her off other people (and especially men), Orpen needs more; and when her mam dies, she and Maeve head to the mainland to find it.
What the novel doesn’t find there, strangely, is any particular sense of place. Think of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker (1980), set in a dismally changed but familiar post-nuclear war Kent; or of last year’s The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, with a semi-tropical location recognisable as a warmed-up Wales. Sarah Davis-Goff has Orpen inform us regularly that the world she moves through is “beautiful”, but there’s so little specific texture that it could be anywhere.
It’s a shame, because the force of a post-apocalyptic novel lies largely in how vividly it evokes the things we have to lose. There’s even an argument that the author of the dystopia is acting under a moral imperative to show us how bad things could be: the ghosts of Christmas yet to come, shaking us from our complacency. That’s why fiction served us nuclear nightmares during the cold war. It’s why in the liberal security of the 1990s post-apocalypses fell out of fashion. And it’s why they came back after the millennium, driven by fears of environmental catastrophe and (as antibiotics falter) uncontrollable disease.
Although Last Ones Left Alive courts comparison with Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, it doesn’t deliver that novel’s transcendent sense of art’s absurd persistence. It lacks the extinctionist glee of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. Nor is there much new here in terms of zombie lore, although there’s a sequel still to come, and perhaps Davis-Goff has bigger plans to unveil. Zombies can be biting satirists as well as mindless flesh-eaters, laying into social conformity in Peter Jackson’s Braindead and consumerism in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead – both themes that could sit well with Last Ones’ intimations of climate crisis.
The book is at its strongest in its zombie attack set pieces, which are tense with the ugly happenstance of real fights. And while its characterisation isn’t spectacularly profound, there’s a winning everyday-ness in the Orpen-mam-Maeve trio that is still rare in portrayals of same-sex parenting. (In her other life as a publisher at Tramp Press, Davis-Goff is an admirably robust feminist.)
Last Ones Left Alive doesn’t bring much new to its genre. Instead, it puts old elements to its own purpose; and, like the skrake, it runs compellingly enough to an irresistible internal logic of violence.
• Last Ones Left Alive is published by Tinder (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
