Paul Auster- In the Country of Last Things

In the Country of Last Things

Faber & Faber

Paul Auster

1987

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

"The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginery, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to the end."

I had great expectations coming in to this very distinctive early Paul Auster novel, since like most people on the Internet I love a good piece of dystopian post-apocalyptic end-of-days fiction. In the Country of Last Things is an incredibly bleak story full of misery and death, set in a world with just the right balance of mystery and detail. Auster's heroin,, Anna, narrates in the form of a letter where she tells the story of her attempt to find her brother William in the decaying metropolis of an unnamed city. In this world society has crumbled as the earth has turned on the human race, with food and energy resources rapidly diminishing countless are dead, as the survivors desperately cling on to some semblance of civilisation. From the very first pages it was clear that Auster's dedication to establishing the tone of this world meant that his usual style of prose would also change.

 

I breezed through the book across a couple of days, captivated by this dying, polluted world, and aided by the familiarity I have with good dystopian survival horror narratives. I think it's clear that Auster was writing a form of genre fiction here. He made his name writing on the surface a form of genre fiction with The New York Trilogy (most specifically the first part; City of Glass) where he created a detective story with all the usual trimmings only viewed through a kaleidoscope. Only it was more than that somehow, a unique, mind-bending experience that reveled in messing with the familiar. I mention all this because In  the Country of Last Things, for better or worse, is not a genre-defying post-modern mindfuck, but is *simply* an excellent normal piece of genre fiction. I suppose I find that slightly disappointing thanks to my expectations of the author, to be honest.

Auster being Auster, there was no way that certain examples of his favourite literary themes wouldn't feature. As always Auster is fixated on the concept of identity, which in the book is under threat on a ubiquitous scale as the human race in the eyes of Anna seem to constantly be losing theirs. The title of the book itself refers to this, the 'last things' representing the final resting place of human culture. At one point in the book Anna is aghast when a man she meets has never heard of an airplane. In a more general sense, concepts such as charity and friendship are dying out in the face of pure despair, The term is cliche, but I found it to be very, very Orwellian altogether, with the main difference between this and Nineteen Eighty Four being the infirmity of the crumbling society. It has the same kind of hopelessness occasionally very slightly permeated by a drop of optimism.

Ultimately though, after having time to ponder it it's impossible for me not to conclude that In the Country of Last Things doesn't have the same depth that I've come to expect from Auster. It's streamlined, minimised prose does firmly establish it in its genre and I really did care to find out Anna's fate, but the lack of detail left me feeling unfulfilled upon the conclusion. Auster usually revels in exploring his ideas and creations from unexpected perspectives, offering stories-within-stories that melt into each other to create one undefinable whole, and I love how the ideas linger in my mind afterwards. I simply didn't get that with this book; it's very good for what it is but it's not really that much more complicated than The Road, for example. There's lots of edginess that gave me the feeling that this was a young author determined to follow his debut impact with something equally anti-cultural, but I think it was quickly proven by his next book Moon Palace that his real legacy would come from focusing on what obviously came naturally to him.