The Last Werewolf

Jesus, took me long enough. Pretty sure that's not anything against the book itself, though it is remarkable how despite how much I was enjoying myself, I could put it down and not pick it up again for days.

The Last Werewolf is almost annoyingly clever, grotesquely funny and casually sexy. Throughout most of the book it teases you about what its wants to be. So, the last werewolf in the world at the twilight of his life, this will be a retrospective, yes? A la The Vampire Lestat or something? Nope, his history is laid out within a few chapters, dramatic, heartbreaking but there's no need to spend three hundred pages on this guy's life. And he seems pretty determined to die, so it can't be a great battle for survival. Ah-ha, so it'll be revenge - ah, nevermind he's not really that into that either. Inter-supernatural-species political conflict? Huh.

Oh, but then “everything changes.” We get a road trip, a la Lolita or Lynch, complete with a companion with an extremely satisfying number of syllables in her name (actually, now that I think of it, this would make a fantastic David Lynch film). Up until that point the prose was rich, the dialogue was clever, and there was even existential angst, but it was all sugar-coated with apathy. Once She shows up, there's no more of that. Jake is now thinking in abstracts - love, the future. Its not too heavy, and in no ways light, but you desperately want things to work out even though you know it won't.

However, Jake has presented himself throughout the book as a quite accidental protagonist, not particularly good-looking (but makes a passable woman), he's easily duped and is crippled by a kick to the nuts within the first fifty pages. His days of fighting vampires and Nazis (vampire Nazis?) are long done and he just wants to roll over. So when he is called to action you can almost feel his embarassment in becoming this valiant knight. And then I'm embarassed for him, and I hate that feeling.

There are so many opposing forces, its silly. Much like life, everyone has an agenda. Except for Jake. There are the vampires. There are supe hunters (yes, I'm borrowing Charlaine Harris' word) the main villain of which is the man who has the vendetta against Jake. There's a rebel faction within the supe hunters, including one of the strangest villains (if he even counts as one) I've ever come across on in a book with a charmingly sane approach to insanity, and I adored him. And there's some French dude who you'd do well to remember. Nothing goes as planned. If the classic story arch involves a gun on the mantle that goes off in the last act, this book slides the gun under the couch, picks it up, drops it and breaks a window when it goes off by accident, killing the neighbor's cat.

All in all, fantastic. Its hilarious, nasty and surprisingly unpretentious despite being enviably written. The only reason it gets four instead of five stars is because I wish it got its claws in me a little more. When I was rushing to finish I wasn't really thinking “I want to know what happens” but rather “Seriously, I've gotta finish this thing.” Maybe it was just because the plot changes every twenty pages. But it is a book that you can just sit in, and because of its ricochet pattern, you can enjoy any part of it independently of the rest. But the whole package is definitely worth it.

This book came out in the wake of the Twilight phenomenon, and Glen Duncan seems determined to ensure that the reader understands that this is not That Sort Of Werewolf Book. Oh no, this is an Edgy Werewolf Book. There is graphic violence, there is a lot of sex, there are a lot of c-bombs thrown around (also, if I don't have to read the word “sly” in conjunction with a c-bomb again it will be too soon). It does do some cool things! The world-building is excellent, Duncan creates an intriguing shadow world in which werewolves are no longer able to transmit their condition through bites, and a religious-turned-paramilitary organization that hunts them down (hence why there's a last werewolf in the first place). But where it fails spectacularly is character development. Jake Marlowe, the titular final lycanthrope, spends most of the first 150 pages of the book despairing at his status in the world and preparing for his own death. It really does not make for a compelling reading experience. The character beats that are hit are largely very similar throughout the book, until a second main character is introduced about halfway through, when Marlowe gets a second set of beats to hit, though this character remains at a remove despite a lot of words being used to describe them. And that's the other thing. The prose, while not terrible by any means, tends towards the overwritten and this does not do anything to make it more dynamic. Some books I read quickly because I can't stop turning the pages, and some I read quickly because I want to get on to the next thing and this was the latter.