The Last Good Man by Thomas McMullan
Review by Gary Kaill
This unsettling debut is a page-turner both cruel and unusual. The creeping dread that Thomas McMullan so expertly builds from The Last Good Man’s opening pages is arrived at via a combination of a series of horrific set-pieces, and a thrillingly unique tone: one that presents as an unwavering hum. It revels in a carefully managed narrative underscore that eschews wonder, dutifully accepts the madness of this broken world, and demands the reader do the same.
That world — and the events that have seen people begin to exit England’s burning, collapsing cities — is barely glimpsed, and the novel benefits from the author’s decision to zoom in on a mere dot on the map: a village on Dartmoor, grey and dank. This place, exposed to the unkind elements but secure from interlopers, has built its robust social order from the darkest customs and a form of justice fuelled by little more than mob rule.
Into this bizarre world comes Duncan Peck, in search of both peace and his cousin James Hale. Hale, having left for the safety of the moors several years earlier, is the head of that mob: the village’s de facto sheriff. He heads up the ‘chasers’: a group of men whose job it is to track and capture those who flee their sentences, ensuring they face punishment. Those punishments are arrived at via judgements scrawled anonymously on a large wall positioned outside the village. A notice board of sorts (‘Sally Lester has a spare wardrobe for collection’), it also allows for the collection of ‘evidence’ against the guilty. Though their crimes, as Peck soon comes to understand, are documented via little more than ribald gossip (‘THOMAS RAMPLE STOLE MY HAMMER. ANNA MOAR IS A CHEATING WHORE’) rather than evidence and investigation. For those crimes, villagers might expect to be roped to heavy furniture for a week or, in the most extreme cases (‘GEOFF SHARPE DOESN’T CUT THE MEAT GOOD. I SAW GEOFF SHARPE STEALING SLIVERS. NOBODY LIKES GEOFF SHARPE’), a form of ritual beating on the village green presented as entertainment no less edifying than a village fete.
Commentators have been quick to draw comparisons, of course, McMullan’s not quite post-apocalyptic setting a dead-ringer, apparently, for the predictable enough big-hitters. But, in the way that The Last Good Man so pointedly concerns itself with the effect of a crazed and fragile society coming under scrutiny by a clear-sighted outsider, it more comfortably shares a lineage with work less curious about the day-to-day horrors and more intrigued by the actions of those who find themselves displaced and disenfranchised by the collapse of their world. On that level, it finds kinship with Jim Crace’s remarkable Harvest: a book that more effectively defines ‘the outsider’ and their position within the established order than any batch of speculative door-stoppers.
How Peck’s arrival comes to so irrevocably upset the delicate balance of this shuttered community is expertly spun out by McMullan, but this is less a novel to admire for its narrative journey (its downbeat ending is effective but entirely predictable) than for its beguiling atmosphere and the care and attention its author gives to the brooding landscape in which its terrible events play out. McMullan conjures a mesmerising sense of place: ‘The night sits with its knees under its chin. The idiot sun has long faded behind its coddling.’ Though the gradually tightening plot is part-told by the ongoing inclusion of the latest comments dubbed on the monstrous wall, McMullan is careful to stir and thicken his narrative at regular intervals.
‘You never really know what’s on the other side of a door,’ observes Peck shortly after his arrival. As a metaphor for the eventual unveiling of the darkness at the heart of this exceptional debut, it is perfectly pitched. The Last Good Man is an essential and commanding slice of folk horror — a wholly successful exercise in world-building that straddles an uncomfortable line between reality and fantasy.
The Last Good Man is published by Bloomsbury, 12th November 2020