Thursday, May 26, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Last Exit by Max Gladstone

 




Last Exit is the latest novel by author Max Gladstone, a major favorite of mine for his Craft Sequence books, as well as his Hugo/Nebula/Everything winning collaboration with Amal El-Mohtar "This is How You Lose the Time War".  Gladstone's work tends to have really enjoyable characters and dialogue, some really interest mechanics underlining his worlds, and a fascinating knack at putting those mechanics and characters together into explosive, surprising, and yet totally understandable conclusions.  And these books tackle some really strong themes too, such as that of capitalism, of selfishness vs coming together for one another, of the power of love, of the powerful vs the powerless, etc.  It's all really great and so I was super excited to hear about Last Exit, his new stand alone more modern fantasy novel that was coming out this year after a several year absence from publication.  

Last Exit is a very very different book than Gladstone's prior work, being a take (despite featuring a multiverse) on our own world instead of 2nd world fantasy.  More particularly, it's a darker take on some similar themes, featuring a team of broken individuals in a dying or horrifying real world, who are desperate to try and find a way to fix what they broke throughout the multiverse without letting their own cracks doom them once again.  The result is a fantasy horror that relies much more on descriptions of what the characters are feeling and seeing than witty dialogue, and this prose style is one that I often (and did here) bounce off of.  It's still a very interesting book and I suspect a lot of people will really enjoy it, but I didn't quite love it as much as I expected to, even as I got where Gladstone was going.  
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Ten years ago, Zelda lost Sal in the Alts as they tried to change the world.  After that, her friends deserted her and went their separate ways, leaving Sal alone to still cling to that painful past and to keep trying to stop the Rot from coming into our world.  And every year since then, on the anniversary of losing the girl she loved, Zelda has knocked on Sal's mother's door in New York and tried to say she's sorry, only to be turned away.  

But this time, ten years later, the door is answered by June, Sal's now 17 year old cousin.  June saw Sal and Zelda together all those years ago, and demands to know what happened to her cousin....and so Zelda shows her the Alts, the other worlds one can fall into through uncertainty.  And in doing so June and Zelda see Sal one more, now fused with the Rot, coming closer and closer to infesting and destroying the world.  And so Zelda, with June in tow, finds herself calling her friends back together for one more trip into the Alts....and one last attempt to save the World, even if they can't save Sal.  

But Zelda and her friends are broken from what happened ten years ago, even as they've all tried to move on, and can't all easily fit back into the old group dynamics that had them exploring the Alts in a ferocious Dodge Challenger.  And the Alts aren't the same as they were back then either - ten years later they are even worse and more barren and deadly than ever.  

And then there's the strange White Cowboy chasing them all, commandeering the bodies and minds of those in his way, and demanding they recognize him as real and something they can't change, or else face the barrel of his gun......
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Last Exit is a very different style of writing than Gladstone's earlier works.  For one, the voice it is told in is almost third person omniscient, with the story bouncing in the middle of chapters between the perspectives of its entire cast - Zelda, June, Sarah, Ish, and Ramon - even as the bulk of the emotional depth of the story falls on Zelda.  For another, this is a much much bleaker book than Gladstone's other books - for the world is our world, and our world is broken, and the protagonists are five characters who are very aware and broken by that fact, as well as their failed attempt at changing it.  And so the book can't get by on witty banter, but instead tells its story and sets the scene and plot through frequent passages of characters observing the horrors and realities they find themselves in, painting a bleak bleak picture.  It's a book that doesn't really lend itself well to those who have trouble visualizing from descriptions, or who tend to skip words in passages - which I do, which made this book a bit difficult for me to get through.  

If that style of writing is less of a problem for you, Last Exit does some really really interesting things with its story and characters.  You have the long lost Sal, a black girl from New York who only saw the purpose in traveling alternate worlds if it could have some effect on our own current world, which is itself a dying awful world for those within it - especially people like her.  You have Sarah, the girl from an indigenous background who saw how harsh the world from the start and who wanted to protect those she cared about more than anything else, and whose reaction to losing her best friend in Sal was to become a doctor and raise her own family of kids to love and protect.  You have Ish, the white boy who was never comfortable in his own big body due to his own softness, who was desperate for a feeling of safety and security in the future - to the point where his life after leaving the group was joining/creating an organization to track people for governments for "security".  You have Ramón, the boy who was the comrade of the group, who fell in love with vehicles and always had to know where he should be going...and whose reaction to the group's failure was to fail out of corporate life and find work in a garage, where he found a boy to love.  You have June, the girl who grew up seeing her cousin having someone who loved her in an awful world, and who sees how awful the world is for black girls like her, and wonders if she might ever have someone who looks at her that way, and who needs to know why it didn't work out for her cousin. 

And then at the heart of it all you have Zelda, the Lesbian Southerner who embraced uncertainty and the ability to get into Alts beyond all the others, who didn't recognize that Sal wasn't as perfect as she seemed and had her own uncertainties about their love, and whose reaction to losing the girl she loved was to break herself trying desperately to find atonement and redemption for 10 long years....even if it meant misery and people hating her.  Zelda is a woman haunted by her past choices, by her past cowardice, and whose guilt leads her to believe that she doesn't deserve the friendship and help of her old friends....to say nothing of June, a girl she believes is innocent and shouldn't be in danger because of her.  And so Zelda's story, and a large part of this story, is one of recognizing that love is something uncertain and that no one is perfect, and that you have to accept that about both yourself and others to be able to embrace it.  

But the larger part of this story is one of uncertainty - after all, you can't reach the Alts by being certain - and about letting go of the "comfortable" awful status quo, which can be incredibly hard or almost impossible even if that status quo is horrible and evil (after all, it's what you know).  The group here struggles with that so much (especially Ish), with Zelda even acting to stop "Rot" from coming into our world to destroy it with the aid of broken people, like a girl beat up by her husband who is comforted by it, rather than letting it possibly bring change.  Without spoiling too much here, it's notable that the second major antagonist is the White Cowboy, the man who demands that the quintet stop what they're doing and settle down on this broken world, and insists that they're the ones that created him and want him.  And hey, when all the Alts are worse and worse, and clearly worse than the world they know, can the White Cowboy and certainty be wrong?  The book takes this theme in fascinating directions - with an answer to that last question that turns it all on its head - and its really interesting for the most part.  

Still, this book is really really bleak at times, and the resultant descriptive atmosphere made it a bit harder than usual for me to get into Gladstone's characters - I had trouble describing Ramón, Ish, and Sarah above for instance because it's hard to explain who they are and who Gladstone made them.  And the story climaxes in a moment of love and decision-taking that is honestly very very muddle and confusing, with one character's final decision seeming to come from nowhere, and the post-climax world being one that seems a bit too conveniently better via deus ex machina....and the ways that it's better are just very very vague and muddled.  For the bleakness of everything else in this book, it's kind of an unsatisfying way to conclude, even if how it got there is very very right.  

So yeah, Last Exit is a really interesting book, if not necessarily one that was great for me, and I suspect it'll get a lot of praise and interest leading up to awards season next year.  Worth a try if you like this kind of reading.  


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