Sunday Salon: Beasts R Us: Review of “The Last Werewolf” by Glen Duncan

Note: There are no spoilers in this review.

Usually I pick up a book involving the paranormal when I want a light break. I was astonished to discover that this book is more like a China Mieville story than a fluff piece. (Mieville is a brilliant English fantasy/science fiction writer.) It is quite literary and the prose evinces considerable intelligence and skill. I would in fact conjecture that the author wanted to tackle the subject of weltschmerz but figured you would need a long-lived person to do the feeling justice: thus, a werewolf. (A werewolf is a much more appealing trope for this purpose than a vampire, since a vampire never goes back to being “human” and feeling what he or she used to feel, whereas a werewolf reverts to human form on all days except those when the moon is full).

Jacob (“Jake”) Marlowe has been alive 201 years. He is believed to be the last werewolf in existence. Once a month, when the moon is full, he is overtaken by a hunger for human flesh, the sating of which cannot be avoided, and moreover arouses a frisson of sexual fulfillment. But he tries to do as little harm as possible by the act:

“Two nights ago I’d eaten a forty-three-year-old hedge fund specialist. I’ve been in a phase of taking the ones no one wants.”

An organization called WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) is dedicated to the total elimination of all paranormal beings, and WOCOP’s head hunter – a vigilante Van Helsing type, is after Jake with a vengeance. In addition, the vampires have come to believe that a wolf bite can confer immunity to the sun, and thus they are also after Jake. Jake and his human protector Harley can barely keep up with all the threats to Jake. In fact, Harley himself is struggling with Jake, because Jake is tired of the utter sameness and repetitiveness of life, and just wants to give in and die.

The characters in this book pose so many fascinating questions: What role do monsters play in the collective imagination? Do we mainly talk about vampires and werewolves as romantic characters now because we no longer have need of the monstrous in the imagination? (I.e., we provide sufficient examples of our own monstrousness in real life, what with genocides and terrorist acts, etc.). How far have humans actually evolved from the beasts from which we descended? In light of the beastliness of human behavior, what could the meaning of life possibly be, or is there no meaning? If there is no meaning, is there no God? Jake and Harley continuously ponder these questions, and there are some very intriguing ideas bandied about on their resolution.

One area of inquiry – the beast in the man – is answered in part by the emphasis on sex in Jake’s life. This book has a lot of sex, and much of it is what the characters themselves might define as “beast-like.” I should digress a bit to admit that one of my favorite things to do after reading a book full of outré sex scenes is to plague my husband with questions such as, “Why are male authors always talking about x, y, and z? Did YOU ever do that?” (Depending on his mood, his response is either to laugh uproariously or to pull out the batteries from his hearing aids.) If you too like to play this game, this book will give you plenty of material. The sex may be raunchy to some, but the language is glorious, viz.:

“…six carnal hours had passed. … Now we lay on the bed like starfish. It’s one of the Platonic forms, lying with someone on a hotel bed after transcendent sex.”

[after meeting someone new]: “These, I knew, were the high-octane minutes, days, weeks, when anything she does can pluck the phallic string.”

It’s not just sex that inspires the author to flights of felicitous prose. He talks about the first time he sees another paranormal:

“I remembered the days when seeing someone move through the air like that would have been a thrilling shock, the days before we’d all seen it countless times in the movies. Modernity’s mimetic inversion: You see the real and are struck by how much it looks like a tediously seamless special effect.”

Ennui itself may be tiresome, but the observations it elicits by the characters are far from it:

“There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realization you just can’t be doing with all that anymore.”

*********************

“Life, like the boring drunk at the office party, keeps seeking you out, leaning on you, killing you with pointless yarns and laughing bad-breathed in your face at its own unfunny jokes.”

And there is this beautifully crafted commentary of Jake’s driving trip across Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah:

“Those unritzy states of seared openness, giant arenas for the colossal geometry of light and weather. Here the main performance is still planetary, a lumbering introspective working-out of masses and pressures yielding huge accidents of beauty: thunderheads like floating anvils; a sudden blizzard. Geological time, it dawns on you, is still going on.”

Trenchant and witty cultural references pepper the story. Talking about his preference for younger victims on which to feed when the moon is full, Jake observes: “Nothing like the blood and meat of the young. You can taste the audacity of hope.” …”I was in Europe when Nietzsche and Darwin between them got rid of God, and in the United States when Wall Street reduced the American Dream to a broken suitcase and a worn-out shoe.” Clever references (even direct quotes!) and parallels to Nabokov’s Lolita fill the second half of the book. And the pièce de résistance, the absolute best line in the book is a mutation of one of the best lines in Jane Eyre that I won’t spoil for you. But it alone makes the price of the book worthwhile!

Discussion: This is an erudite, thoughtful book with a riveting plot in addition to a contemplative bent. While interrogating moral decency, the author savages it with a complicated choreography of biological compulsion and media-informed indifference. He excoriates people who live in “the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze,” while nature’s magnificence goes unnoted:

“We lay near each other but not touching, silent recipients of Pan’s globally ignored dawn suite, a soft exhalation through turf and leaf, the whirr of small wings, the introspective clambering of beetles, the shiver of water. The world…is oozing, teeming, crawling with miracles.”

He writes about being stuck with what you are, “the lousy furniture you can’t change” – in this case, having a lycanthropic heart.” Is there a hell then? Or is it a fiction we inherit to maintain control over behavior? Or is hell something else; is it life that has gone on too long? Could it simply be life without love?

There are some truly inspirational uses of language in this book, as when, in Wales, Jacob travels through “the vowel-starved hills”; when he, musing on the absence of God, sees the night sky “like an abandoned warehouse of stars”; when he characterizes a scene as like “an eighties album cover”; or when he characterizes himself – half monster, half man, as “a cocktail of contraries.” Even while the story may be bestial and sometimes brutal, the often luminous language is worth celebrating.

Evaluation: Any drawbacks of this book were more than offset for me by the glorious use of language by the author, and his exposing of how much of the beast all of us have within us. The characters are remarkably likeable, in spite of their various eccentricities and predilections. A truly impressive piece of literature.

Rating: 4/5

Published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, 2011

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