Civilization is so pervasive, so consequential, that it's all-but impossible to imagine our lives without it. It has sparked ideas and ignited industrialization, enshrined the rule of law and elevated the power of the people, but it has also virtually blinded us to the truth, that it has bound us up in its conformist chains. This is a good bargain. After all, whatever we lose by way of personal freedom we more than gain back in enlightenment and wealth. This is indisputable. But just what have we surrendered? Is the absence of civilization truly so destructive? Would a world predicated on personal freedom necessarily be anarchic? Philosophers and anthropologists have been asking themselves these questions for generations, but Mr. Winter's has run the experiment. And though the destination may not be revelatory, the journey certainly is entertaining.
It is virtually certain that, in six months, everyone on Earth will be dead. This is the truth that confronts Harry Palace one unforgettable morning when he wakes to the news that a planet-killing asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. A policeman in a quiet, new-England town, one would expect that he, like every other living human, would be tempted to throw off the boring mundanity of daily existence, either by revelling in the freedom of these final days, or by ending it all on their own terms. But Harry Palace is not like the thieves and the opportunists, the professors and the pilots, who have forsaken their lives and their posts for a final, explosive experience. Harry palace holds the thin blue line against the darkness, righteously holding up the law in a world going to pieces.
The only problem is that it's almost impossible to be a policeman in the endtimes. Cell service is spotty, hospitals are barely staffed and the police force's investigative powers are being shut down. After all, what's the point in solving any sort of crime when there's so little time left? But to harry palace, truth is truth, right is right, and an oath is an oath. And even if it kills him, he's going to hold that line until the bitter end, as best he knows how.
An engaging journey through a tragicomic landscape, The Last Policeman and its successor Countdown City are pieces of imaginative near-future fiction. Ben Winters, though far from the first to attempt to conceive of a world careening through its last days, nonetheless manages to lay it out with style, with passion and with originality. His post-Announcement New England is vividly and organically drawn, a place where, though law and order is practically maintained, the soul has been ripped out of the community. There remains a societal superstructure within which to operate, but families are deteriorating, services are decaying and people are wandering off to please themselves before the end. Consequently, the author's world is not one of instant and gratuitous violence, but one in which the social, economic and civil webs that bind us all together are being sundered thread by thread, widening existing holes through which yet more vulnerable people slip into oblivion.
More than its rich environment, though, The Last Policeman's protagonist is also relatively rare. In a world slowly fraying at its seams, harry Palace is a humble, even geeky, rock of stability. He's a square, a man who does good because he has never thought to do anything else. While many of his fellows escape their obligations, he stays to do the job he's always wanted to do, an unthanked, unwanted, and unacknowledged pillar of civilization that someone will eventually break. In this, Palace does the series wonderful service as both an object of amusement and admiration. The former comes as the reader snickers at his naivety and his earnest doggedness; the later arrives when we come to understand just how much he must sacrifice in order to stand up in the face of a tide that even he seems to know will wash him away.
The first two volumes of the Last Policeman are by no means perfect. The author's mysteries are as threadbare as they are insignificant. Thus, as Harry labors to solve them, we are left to snicker and scorn him for either his thick-headedness or his gullibility. And given that Harry was already a square, having these attributes emphasized in this way is less than flattering. Moreover, we're often left with the impression that Harry's humanity only exists as a means by which to highlight its absence in everyone else around him. Which draws scrutiny to Harry's spotless character that it cannot withstand. Howevermuch the works may be flawed, the extent to which Mr. Winter's has avoided the cliches of apocalyptic fiction, and attempted instead to ask intriguing questions about what the world would realistically look like if all our deaths were as certain as sunrise, grants his work imagination and depth that easily overcomes its shortcomings.
An interesting idea that is neither boring or derivative... (3/5 Stars)
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