Thomas McMullan, The Last Good Man,
Bloomsbury, 2020.
Duncan Peck has
travelled alone to Dartmoor in search of his cousin. He has come from
the city, where the fires are always burning.
In his cousin's
village, Peck finds a place with tea rooms and barley fields, a
church and a schoolhouse. Out here, the people live an honest life –
and if there's any trouble, they have a way to settle it. They sit in
the shadow of a vast wall, inscribed with strange messages. Anyone
can write on the wall, anonymously, about their neighbours, about any
wrongdoing that might hurt the community. Then comes the reckoning.
The stranger from
the city causes a stir. He has not been there long before the village
wakes up to the most unspeakable accusation; sentences daubed on the
wall that will detonate the darkest of secrets.
A troubling, uncanny book about fear and atonement, responsibility and justice, and the violence of writing in public spaces, The Last Good Man dares to ask: what hope can we place in words once extinction is in the air?
“A Scarlet Letter for our times ... Zamyatin's We meets Lord of the Flies meets de Tocqueville meets cancel culture meets spite and malice meets Jesus. Should words be power? Justice or mercy? What price rage?” – MARGARET ATWOOD
“This is a visceral and disquieting debut novel about the power of words, and should be read by anyone who uses the internet” – New Statesman
“McMullan makes highly effective use of the rugged landscape, full of unease and portents, in his creepily unsettling debut, a timely tale about the dangers of toxic rhetoric and mob rule” – Daily Mail
“A brilliantly unsettling parable about how we police our societies through violence, language and shame” – independent.co.uk
“Innovative and timeless” – Irish Times
“An extraordinary and disquieting work of imagination, and as original as any novel I've read in recent memory ... The Last Good Man makes visible the dark matter of our troubled zeitgeist, and the cruelty that animates moral community” – ROB DOYLE,
“A clean, crackling novel ... McMullan updates Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to today's sanctimonious climate ... An arresting debut about medieval justice that has plenty to say about the dangers of moral puritanism” – Metro
“An earthy, gripping piece ... A serious and seriously good book” – NB Magazine
“McMullan's skill truly lies in his prose…a startling and evocative tale” – Set the Tape
“An unsettling and startling work of literary imagination ... A shocking but compulsive read” – ON Magazine
“Brilliantly eerie” – Dystopia Junkie
“Eerie and atmospheric” – Sunday Post
“An essential and commanding slice of folk horror - a wholly successful exercise in world-building that straddles an uncomfortable line between reality and fantasy” – Lunate
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. - Sarah Ditum
“If you can’t trust in words, what can you trust in?”—this question, asked but never answered, echoes through Thomas McMullan’s debut novel, The Last Good Man. In it, language carries a price; it exacts heavy cost. Words are spent freely—and parsimoniously weighed and measured. They punish, reward and disguise. They reveal truths and spin falsehoods. They are judge and jury. They break bones.
Our hero is Duncan Peck. There has been some kind of ecological catastrophe—slow-burning and terminal. Food is rationed, and there are too many hungry mouths. Law and order is arbitrary and haphazard. We meet Peck on the opening pages, becalmed in a soaking winter mist on Dartmoor, a remote expanse of rugged ground in south-west England. Peck is fleeing the city where everywhere “there is the smell of death”. He has come to meet his childhood companion, James Hale, who vanished three years’ before. Out of nowhere, Hale has sent a letter inviting Peck to a village—never named—hidden away on Dartmoor. At first, it seems a kind of Shangri-La: refuge from the gradual contraction of the world outside. There is a teashop, a school and a church; pig pens, chickens, and stores of crops: food. But most of all, for the lonely Peck, worn threadbare and ghostly by the ducking and diving of city living, there is community:
The pang of food hangs above the heads of men, women and children jostling. The smell of wet earth is masked with the rich scent of pastry and a loaf of barley bread is broken into handfuls, given out in baskets to those that want a taste.
The village has a ghastly open secret, though: a vast wall, massive on the skyline above the village. Its “angular jut … is unmistakable. Taken against the moorland it looks so unnatural, so much of a statement and yet small compared to the blankness all around.” On the wall is pasted the usual parish council bumf: missing cats, choir meetings and after-school clubs. But above these notices, it holds accusations too: scrawled huge, anonymous and unarguable: “I KNOW ALL ABOUT ANNA MOAR AND SCOTT DOYLE AND IT IS DISGUSTING WHAT THEY ARE DOING. SCOTT DOYLE IS A FUCKER. ANNA MOAR IS A WHORE.”
The village turns on the spike of these accusations. Those found guilty are burdened with furniture. Tables, chest of drawers, chairs and hall mirrors are strapped to them—a punishment both barbaric and absurd. Find your name on the wall repeatedly, though, and the reckoning is more baroque. The accused are strapped to scaffolding on the village green, their limbs smashed with metal clubs. They are placed in stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables. People who try to escape are hunted down by bands of their neighbours, called chasers. The town has its own quasi-sheriff who organises this hue and cry. When Peck arrives, his old friend, James Hale, is in this role.
McMullan has crafted an impressively taut, thoughtful novel from these exuberant materials. He writes with a muscular lyricism; the book’s moral gaze is both pitiless and ambivalent. The idea for the village’s great wall came to McMullan, a journalist, when he was teaching in rural China. In one small village, he found a building scrawled with the misdeeds of the community: a palimpsest of slights and sins. It was a relic of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a communal purging of bourgeois sentiment. McMullan’s usually voluble guide fell quiet in its shadow; silenced by this singular carnival of accusation. This extraordinary encounter surfaces obliquely in The Last Good Man. By distancing his novel in time and space, McMullan gives himself thinking room to navigate the deeper resonances of this artefact—how do we trust what is said or written? Why is language less fickle than the human heart? Is community anything more than a shared fiction: brittle and all-too-easily co-opted?
The Last Good Man gives no easy answers. A note of cool, sustained ambiguity runs through the narrative, right up to its quiet fade-out of its ending. McMullan makes no bones of his literary influences: the blood-soaked spectre of mid-career Cormac McCarthy—Child of God, Blood Meridian —haunts the grandeur of the landscape descriptions, and the sudden flashes of brutish violence which punctuate the narrative; the stolid bulk of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is unavoidable in the post-apocalyptic setting and the festivals of communal denunciation and retribution.
But he tips his hat to more unexpected antecedents, too. Most chapters start with a fresh set of accusations daubed on the wall. They appear, in different type and font, before the main bulk of the story. It’s a potent device, lending a dizzying breathlessness to the action. “Things have been getting worse,” characters frequently remark to each other as charge is daubed on charge, and calls for revenge grow louder and more violent. This nesting of motives and accusations, and the plot’s relentless percussive beat, calls to mind the pacing and murky morality of Raymond Chandler’s detective fiction. Yet just beneath these accusations, McMullan contrasts quiet, sparsely beautiful descriptions of village life:
The paint is still wet on the wall; a cardinal dew facing the village as mist hangs over the fields. A sonorous void. The light is new born, it ignites the land in all its contours. A lone cow counts the perimeter of its enclosure. The pigs are burning in their dreams.
I can’t be alone in hearing echoes of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milkwood’ here. The shushing, slapping rhythms of “still wet on the wall” recall Thomas’s famous opening lines: “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbingsea”. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 is another parallel. In that novel, as in Last Good Man, no distinction is made between human and non-human life; the comings and goings of both receive the same equal and exacting attention. Human darkness—in McGregor, the disappearance of a young girl; in McMullan, murder, betrayal and corporal punishment—is simultaneously shadowed in, and overshadowed by, the inscrutable turning of the natural world.
Late in Last Good Man, two characters dispose of a flensed pony carcass in a bog, “its mane fann[ing] out across the famished ground”. The saturated soil swiftly vanishes their evidence: “The bog has swallowed the remains of the pony, and now there is nothing, absolutely nothing, except the two of them in the dark.” But this largesse demands repayment; and one of those characters will later themselves tumble into a mire. “He is a few feet away, buried up to his chest,” McMullan writes. “The ground is up to his neck, one arm already below the waterline, the other outstretched … his mouth disappears below the earth.” It is perhaps too simplistic to suggest that the brute calculus which rules the villagers’ lives—a leg for lustiness, a chest of drawers for greed—is mimicked in their environment. But certainly the dull concussions of ecological catastrophe which reverberate in Last Good Man suggest the debts humanity owes nature are being called in. Note that it is “his mouth” which is last to drown. In a book in which language is so charged, it is significant that this muddy gargling is the most chilling sound we hear.
But words also hold weight. McMullan pushes the carrying capacity of language—both in his own high-wire descriptions, and in the various registers of writing encountered in Last Good Man. He is an enthusiastic foot soldier in Martin Amis’s war against cliché. Hot pies cannot simply bake in the oven; they must “purr in their new life”. Occasionally, this mania for originality forces some comic contortions. Those piping pastries have been retrieved from the oven and “all three men sit in silence with hot pies on porcelain plates, as if conducting some strange séance”. But, more often, these experiments triumph. Commonplace occurrences are seen anew: limed with strangeness and wonder.
She closes her eyes and listens to the thunder roll through the moorland. She thinks about how many aches there are amongst the storm clouds. The rain falling over the tor, the wind and the rumble, all of them foreign languages. A thousand tongues wagging.
Gossip, rumour, incomprehension—these are the stuff of nature as well as human interaction. There is an authentic freshness here which, again, recalls McCarthy. In both writers’ work, we perceive dimly a great and terrible space which encompasses the brief flicker of human lives: an outer darkness that admits no light and baffles comprehension.
Not that the characters need much help generating chaos. The village is built on a shadowy edifice of half-truths and outright lies. The wall is the most public example of this mayhem. But writing is used to hoard knowledge and preserve power as well. Maisie, the daughter of Hale’s neighbour, scribbles compulsively in a diary.
‘It’s clever to keep a diary,’ Peck says, hovering closer to the girl … Another step, but as if he crossed some invisible threshold. Maisie’s attention is provoked and she turns with a swipe of the eyes. ‘It’s private,’ she slices in a small but adamant voice.
Her secrecy has a more sinister twin in the record keeping of Brian Goss, the village’s oleaginous headman. Goss politely ducks the label of leader; yet the “fabled records” of the community’s accounts give him an unspoken authority, ill-defined but unshakeable. Peck reflects: “This administrator, this minister will not have his name stamped on the judgements that he sets on his way. Perhaps it is cowardice. No doubt it is cleverness, to stand one step below the chopping block.” The first writing system, cuneiform, was developed by Sumerian scribes nearly 5,000 years’ ago; even after civilisation’s collapse, McMullan notes, it is civil servants who will inherit the earth.
The wall, Goss says,
makes the world a “place that can be understood”. Yet this
legibility eludes the reader; like Peck, we leave the book—and the
village—no wiser than we arrived. A disquieting vagueness lingers
long after McMullan’s riddling novel is done. “Sometimes it can
be hard to know up from down. It can be impossible to make out the
edges.” Here, at the end of all things, words are no help at all. -
Alex Diggins
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/words-words-words/
The air is rich enough to turn stones to men and men to stone. Careful not to step on anything that will make a noise, Peck edges towards the sound of heavy breathing, towards the black mark that becomes a body in the bog.
Duncan Peck watches as a group of men and women in hooded raincoats pull a man from the bog, bind him, and cart him away in a wheelbarrow. Leading the group is James Hale, the boy his mother had taken in, the ‘cousin’ he had grown up with and grown to love; the man who had crept way from the house in the night, leaving him alone in the crumbling city where food was running out and danger was everywhere.
Hale had finally written to him, inviting him to join him in a remote and isolated village on Dartmoor. Now, Peck stays hidden from the rain-coated group but in the fading light he follows their faint tracks across the bog-strewn moorland. The first sign he sees of the village is a wall ‘the size of a large barn’. As he gets closer, he sees that it stands alone and there are papers and posters stuck to it. Some have simple community messages and requests, but at the top of the wall are posters scrawled in red paint and in capital letters:
GEOFF SHARPE DOESN’T CUT THE MEAT GOOD. I SAW GEOFF SHARPE STEALING SLIVERS. NOBODY LIKES GEOFF SHARP. I HOPE GEOFF SHARPE DIES.
Peck is nervous, not knowing what to expect in this strange place, and not knowing how his ‘cousin’ will react to his sudden, unannounced arrival. Having secretly watched Hale and another man through an uncurtained window, he enters Hale’s home with a revolver cocked. Hale welcomes him and introduces him to his neighbour, Peter, who confiscates the gun, telling Peck that guns are banned in this village. This gun, however, will eventually cause much damage.
The tension McMullan builds in these opening pages is sustained throughout the book. Partly, it is fuelled by Peck’s own uncertainties as a stranger in a close community that has developed its own system of control and justice. He questions the influence of the wall, where anonymous people write their opinions and make accusations. And he is disturbed by the sorts of ‘atonement’ those deemed transgressors of the community’s values must make. These include being exposed to public ridicule in the stocks; carrying heavy pieces of furniture roped to their backs; or having a limb deliberately broken. He and Hale also share a past trauma linked to the death of Peck’s mother, and this is gradually revealed as Peck recalls their boyhood.
Hale, Peck learns, has become leader of the ‘chasers’, who bring back those who run away from justice. Hale decides the atonement and administers the blows to break a limb if he deems this necessary. He is a powerful man in the village, but Peck, as an outsider, sees the way this village functions, sees the way gossip and ill-feeling can distort the truth, and sees the usual human flaws hidden and revealed. The village seems well-established, but:
After enthusing about the apple trees and the barley fields, the school and the pub, there are questions about the wall, the stage and scaffold in the middle of the green, the furniture carried about. Hale does his best to listen to Peck’s misgivings. ‘It keeps the peace’ he assures.
Hale’s neighbour, Peter, is an awkward, ineffectual man, who is a poor workman and makes a joke of his own clumsiness. He has alienated people, and someone writes terrible (false) accusations about him on the wall. When Peter panics and runs away, Hale and his ‘chasers’ go after him, and Peck is persuaded to go with them. This precipitates a dramatic chain of events which link Hale, Peck, Peter, Peter’s wife Charlotte and their young daughter, Maisie. The system of law and order in the village is compromised and Peck’s own ideas of change for the good are tested.
Charlotte and Maisie are interesting characters, and Charlotte’s thoughts and emotions are threaded through the pages. When she, too, runs away, her experiences on the moors offer a different view of the way in which the community works.
Thomas McMullan tells a dramatic story and he tells it well. He conveys the mixed emotions of his characters with empathy and handles violence plainly and, sometimes, with surprising poetic imagery. Occasionally his imagery becomes strange – ‘the night sits with its knees under its chin’; ‘the candles are lonely’ – but this poetic flair brings village life and the Dartmoor landscape to life.
Underlying the story, but never obtrusive, is an exploration of the way in which people communicate with each other and how group opinions influence truth and justice – something that is currently very relevant.
In a ‘Note from the Author’ which accompanied my proof copy (and which I expect will be incorporated in the final book) McMullan describes how the book began after he had encountered an old wall plastered with papers in a room in a Chinese university where the photocopying machines were kept. When the words were translated for him by a Chinese friend, he learned that they were ‘crude, hateful, often sexual slurs about named people’ – ‘a vile type of graffiti’. He learned, too, that these public writings had been part of Chinese culture since imperial times but were best known now for their use during the Cultural Revolution. This wall represented a ‘violent tradition’ being continued.
McMullan’s own assessment of The Last Good Man rings true:
Truth, language and identity are at the heart of this book, but this is ultimately a story about people holding themselves together, living with grief, contending with ideas of goodness. - Ann Skea
https://newtownreviewofbooks.com.au/thomas-mcmullen-the-last-good-man-reviewed-by-ann-skea/
On Dartmoor there is a surprising place to find – a cashless, barter-led cooperative of a village, where nobody spends anything, but everyone works and puts the fruits of their labours out there for free. It’s not all happy-go-lucky, however, as Duncan Peck, our way to explore this place, comes to discover. The village is overlooked by a huge free-standing stump of a wall, and beyond the parish notices about what is available, and what events are when, it often gets filled in with potentially libellous, gossippy accusations. In this village, where small transgressions result in the guilty being forced to walk around all day with heavy furniture strapped to their back so they can barely sit, and where the stocks are always ready for use, enough malevolent comment on the wall can force you to flee, out to risk your luck in the boggy wasteland beyond the village. The retribution against anyone criminal enough to escape and be caught is great – but what might happen if the claims are too close to the bone for Peck’s cousin, and others in positions of power?
This was an enjoyable read, and one that sent the mind quite reeling. Reeling, in my experience at least, for comparisons. It had some of the pre-Victorian, non-industrialised world perhaps of The Crucible or The Scarlet Letter – the book goes a long way whilst hiding quite when this is, only showing that we’re in a world where the city Peck has left is a much worse place, and the village is now running low on teabags. It clearly could be said to be a metaphor for the kind of flaming comments and slander seen on another wall – that on Facebook, and this definitely has parallels with social media. But something about everything here – the tone, the style, and the characters trying to get the best out of justice, also made me think of the Three Billboards movie.
It must be noted that none of that prevents this book from being its own entity, and nothing this rich and surprising would ever be happy to act as a clear metaphor for just one thing and leave it at that. This could be said to look at any society where the search for truth and justice is carried out less forensically than needed, and where one anonymous, bad word is allowed to hold sway. It also makes us think – not that this here is exactly an eye for an eye – what kind of punishment our criminals should serve. All this and a strong page-turning quality, in a debut novel, shows great promise from a creator previously known, apparently, for plays. This has hard themes and events that are never glamorised or treated poorly, so it can tend to being a little too dark for some potential readers, but nobody should be put off considering this earthy, gripping piece. The Last Good Man is, ultimately, a serious and seriously good book. - John Lloyd
https://nbmagazine.co.uk/the-last-good-man-by-thomas-mcmullan/
Thomas McMullen: How a Chinese wall of shame inspired my novel
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18930828.thomas-mcmullan-chinese-wall-shame-inspired-novel/
Interview: Thomas McMullan, Author Of The Last Good Man
https://yorkshiretimes.co.uk/article/Interview-Thomas-McMullan-Author-of-The-Last-Good-Man
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.