The booklog post on Scott Westerfeld’s The Last Days got to be long enough that I wanted to split it just to keep it from eating the front page. Which would sort of preclude using the extended entry field for spoiler protetction, so here’s the stuff with the spoilers. Don’t read the rest of this before you read the book.
As I said in the non-spoiler review, one of the strongest points of this book is the character voices. There are lots of nice little touches in there, like the way Zahler isn’t as dim as the others think, or the fact that Moz is making the money to pay alana Ray by playing guitar in the worm-haunted subways.
It’s also good to see Cal and Lace from Peeps again, and they’re different enough from the way they apepar in Cal’s head to ring true. The Night Mayor bits weren’t as good as the parasite stuff in Peeps, but they were a reasonable substitute. There are a few new insights into the Night Watch that were kind of interesting as well.
There were a few things late in the book that I had problems with. First of all, I wasn’t wild about the way the origin of Minerva’s mystery language was just sort of left hanging. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to accept the biological explanation as truth. I sort of hope not, because it was kind of dumb.
I also thought things were a little rushed toward the end. The book builds very slowly to the band’s first gig, and then the entire war with the worms is dispensed of in about five pages. It happened a little too fast, and it was a little too pat– I wasn’t wild about the idea that only our five intrepid heroes could save the world. I would’ve been happier if the Night Watch had managed to round up some other singers, and run several different tours in different countries.
Finally, I was a little botehred by the sudden shift in the voice in the Epilogue. for most of the book, the various POV sections are very immediate, in that first-person-narration-with-no-clear-source way. It’s like we’re listening to the monologue in Moz’s head while the action is taking place, or very shortly afterwards.
In the Epilogue, it seems to suddenly jump to narration from a specific time and place, some years after the main action. It’s almost worth it for two lines: “Pearl is, as you know, running for Mayor of New York again,” and “One of Cal Thompson’s books covers it the best,” but it’s kind of jarring. Then again, I’m awfully sensitive to that sort of thing, so I doubt this is likely to be widely regarded as a problem.
Anyway, as I said, those are minor quibbles, regarding what is a very good book. And my annoyance at the pace may well have been a function of my surroundings when I read it in the waiting area at the emergency room. I definitely recommend reading it.