Hail, the last man standing
by Lauren Beukes (Michael Joseph, ebook and audio) ★★★★✩
IT’S 2020 and a rampaging virus is attacking the cells of men, rendering them cancerous. Within a couple of years, the global male population has all but gone, along with the last remaining stocks of hand sanitiser. You can’t imagine how quickly the world can change in six months, thinks Cole, a woman on the run with her 12-year-old son. There probably isn’t a more resonant sentence to be found in any other novel published this year.
Lauren Beuke’s fast-moving thriller was finished some time before Covid-19 made itself known and, with the sort of timing no publisher could manufacture, arrives in a climate unusually receptive to the plausibility of a worldwide pandemic. It’s a story made for a latenight Netflix ten-parter: Cole’s son Miles appears to be immune to the virus, making his sperm a hugely valuable commodity for the traffickers sprouting out of an economically ravaged US that include Cole’s own sister, Billie.
A botched attempt to kidnap Miles leaves Billie with a serious head injury, and Cole and Miles, now disguised as a girl, fleeing across a fearful and militant America, populated by all-female guerilla communities and religious sects, and where pregnancy is prohibited. Hot on her heels is an increasingly delirious and desperate Billie, in thrall to her guntoting paymasters.
Beukes’ vertiginous prose makes up in velocity for what it lacks in style and splices gut-punching action sequences and feminist gender politics with an impressively light touch. It bubbles with big ideas about the fluidity of gender constructs and the idealistic impulse to rebuild in the wake of disaster.
THE VERDICT
Five years in the writing, this intelligent speculative novel about a pandemic feels alarmingly close to home