The Last One

"THE LAST ONE" by Alexandra Olivia. A fun if disturbing read (lots of corpses) about a woman competing in a survival reality show who doesn't know the apocalypse came and wiped out most of the world. It is, if nothing else, a lesson to be nice to people even if you think they are actors.

I really enjoyed this one - there are almost two books going on here. The first is about the show, with enough details about Reality Shows behind the scenes to be a lot of fun for those who watch them, and the second is an interesting story from the point of view of a character who is slowly descending into madness. The main character, Zoo, threads them together and keeps you turning pages even when you're almost too grossed out to want to.

Note: new parents might want to wait until their kids are a year or two older before reading this, if my friends with kids reactions to me telling me about this book in detail is right.

Not quite what I was expecting and not quite as good as I was hoping. Despite alluding to the contrary in the summary, we the reader know what is real and what isn't from page 1. I feel like if the author had left that a mystery until later then this novel would have been a bit more compelling, but even knowing what was going on it was still an interesting read. Just not an amazing one.

I didn't really like any of the characters, not even the main character, Zoo and the story dragged a little about 60% of the way through. I feel like it suffered from having maybe too many characters to focus on and it became more of a "this person did this and that person did that" narrative and less about what people were feeling or thinking. The survivors in the show weren't even referred to by name most of the time being called "cheerleader boy" and "biology" and "waitress" etc so the few times their actual names were used it became confusing to figure out who was being referred to.

I found a few plot points problematic too. A lot of the things that Zoo notices (or doesn't) I feel like you'd have to be stupid not to realise what was real and what wasn't - even with her limited eyesight. And there didn't really seem to be any point to introducing the young boy to the story. I guess he moved the plot along a little, but not in a way that couldn't have happened without him.

That said, the story kept me reading, so it wasn't all bad. It just could have been better.

I loved the concept of The Last One; what if you were taking part in a reality show and something happened to the outside world, something big, and you were oblivious? What if you assumed everything you heard was just part of the show? The very first page shows the reader something Zoo doesn’t, that a deadly disease takes down the production crew; that the contestants are on their own.

The chapters alternate between the filming of the show, In the Dark, and the present from the perspective of one contestant, named Zoo by the producers. She’s not on the show for the money but instead she wants one last adventure, one last bit of irresponsibility, before she settles down and starts a family, a family she’s not sure she’s ready for. We learn a little about her background, but not much, and it focuses mostly on how happy she and her husband are, how much they love each other. In the reader’s mind, there’s the constant reminder that he could be dead and she wouldn’t know.

The narrative from the production company’s point of view highlights a lot of what is fake about reality TV. They choose personas for the contestants and edit the footage to maintain them, even if they stray far from their original selves. In these chapters, the characters are referred to by nicknames, based on their occupations, further dehumanising them and emphasising those personas. They are playing a part, even if they don’t know it.

In the early chapters the producers seem obsessed with appearance. More time is taken in describing what they look like than who they are, in contrast to Zoo’s descriptions which use their real names. The cast is diverse but in an engineered way that makes sure they tick all the boxes. They bring in Waitress to be the red head, but also play the bimbo character. There are hints that another character is there partly for looks.

Honestly, the use of present tense for the entire book didn’t really work for me. I struggled to get into the style at first and it irks me a bit that despite the narrative going back and forward in time, it’s always present tense. I mean it kind of worked for the production company in the way that it could have been like stage directs, explaining what’s happening as it’s happening. There’s one particular scene near the end where it was put to good use, but overall it just jarred a little.

You might think our protagonist is a bit slow on the uptake, convinced that everything going on around her is a construct of the show. I was about to get annoyed with her until I remembered some experiments Derren Brown did, how people can be manipulated into believing something’s real, even something they believe is impossible. Taken from Zoo’s point of view, she thought she was in a TV show that some felt had already crossed the line in terms of taste, where reality and staging combine. It was known to be a big budget show, she can be given for assuming everything is there to create a narrative.

Considering how little we know about some of the characters, I became surprisingly attached to them. It gives you plenty to think about, how we perceive people on TV but also what would our reactions to an actual apocalypse be? Have we become so blasé about seeing it in fiction, would be believe it if it happened?

Review copy provided by publisher.