This is a dark, compelling novel about the only two things humans really have to fear: each other, and being alone. We are apex predators: if another creature kills you, it will usually be one of your own kind. But your own kind can hardly be avoided. A life outside society – no aid, no warmth, no walls, no one to share the labours of survival with – will be a short and unpleasant one. This irreconcilable need and repulsion explains how we come to find Duncan Peck at the start of this novel, an outsider in the mists of Dartmoor, running from people who terrify him, and towards people who might not be much better.
The Last Good Man seems to be set in the near future. Ecological collapse is hinted at; social collapse is explicit. Peck has fled an unnamed city, a place of fire and violence where people eke out existence on a dwindling supply of tinned food. Life there is an act of constant vigilance: “In his final few days in the city, he had been a pair of eyes and little else, watching the struggles of his few remaining neighbours from behind a window.” All his hopes now lie in a nameless village, to which he has been invited by his cousin James Hale. Hale’s letter promised a new home of unimaginable plenty, but on first approach it looks a lot like another fiefdom of nightmares.
The set-piece opening is vividly nasty, recalling the smack-in-the-face technique of early Ian McEwan, and so accomplished that it’s easy to forget this is a debut. Peck creeps up, unseen, on “a black mark that becomes a body in the bog” – a man, who has been chased down by 20 men and women dressed in raincoats and armed with metal poles, and with Peck’s cousin leading the pack. Despite this recognition, Peck hangs back, assuring himself it has nothing to do with him: “You are blameless, he tells himself. You are good.” The man is hauled out against his protests, put in a wheelbarrow and pushed back to the village.
When Peck makes his appearance in the village shortly after, he learns that what he saw on the moor was the village’s justice system in action. Offenders are put in the stocks, or have a limb smashed publicly; others are “burdened”, meaning they are strapped to heavy objects (a nightstand, a wardrobe) and forced to carry them for the duration of their sentence. The accused can choose to turn themselves in, but the nature of the punishments means most make a run for it, like the man Peck watched as he arrived; and in any case, it’s more satisfying when there’s a hunt.
Even more intriguing is how the offenders are identified. There are no police in the village, no judiciary, no way to contest the truth or defend yourself. Instead, there is the wall, standing outside the village. Lower down, it’s covered with notices about items available to share (there’s no money in the village: everything is given freely, so long as you are “good”) or events scheduled. The upper levels, though, are a scrawl of unsigned accusations: “GEOFF SHARPE DOESN’T CUT THE MEAT GOOD. I SAW GEOFF SHARPE STEALING SLIVERS. NOBODY LIKES GEOFF SHARPE. I HOPE GEOFF SHARPE DIES.”
One mention on the wall can be got away with. Two will probably be fine. More than that, and something will have to be done. (And if that sounds a bit like Twitter, it’s surely deliberate. The internet doesn’t exist in the novel, but it’s nonetheless one of the best portrayals I’ve read of the dynamics of online mobs.) The wall decides the truth of the village: “If we can’t trust in people and words,” Hale explains, “there’s no point in living with people and words.” When Peck first sees the wall, it strikes him as both a “cleaver” and an “anchor”, savagery and security in one.
That slipperiness is at the heart of the novel. Peck first approaches the village through the mist, and his view remains obscure, uncertain. The wall is monstrous; but then, the only alternatives to the village seem to be “farmhouses populated by old bones and communities of agony by the old motorway”, so perhaps its monstrosity is necessary. Peck wants to be “good” by his own lights, not to fall under the sway of the village’s alarming moral code, maybe even to become a reformer; but the village requires him to be “good” on its own terms if he is to live there. Despite his intentions, the wall pulls him in.
The spiralling demands of justice in the village make for gripping storytelling, and McMullan has a sureness with violence that puts him in the company of Sarah Moss and Benjamin Myers (or the film director Ben Wheatley, who would ace an adaptation of this). Weaknesses show up in the more loosely written flashbacks to Peck’s time in the city, while a firm grasp on the levers of social psychology doesn’t quite make up for a general flimsiness of characterisation. Even so, The Last Good Man is viciously captivating: frightening to be around, impossible to put aside – a bit like other humans, in fact.
• The Last Good Man is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
