Flatiron Books: 272 pages, $29
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Hundreds to thousands of animal species go extinct every year, according<\/a> to the World Wildlife Fund, and things are projected to get even worse<\/a> if climate change continues unabated. A new novel by U.S.-based Australian writer Emma Sloley, \u201cThe Island of Last Things,\u201d imagines a time in the nearish future when not only animals but whole ecosystems of living things have been wiped out, leaving a handful of surviving zoos around the globe attempting to preserve the species in their care. Except that those zoos close, one by one, due to a multitude of reasons: insufficient funding, a movement protesting the care and feeding of (nonhuman) animals in a time of mass human suffering and a deadly strain of Candida spreading through the wildlife population. The last remaining zoo sits on Alcatraz Island, inhabiting the grounds and structures of the former prison.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Island of Last Things\u201d is largely narrated by Camille, a woman in her mid-20s who prefers the company of animals to people and has worked on Alcatraz for pretty much the entirety of her adulthood. Unlike most of the other workers, who travel to the mainland every Sunday, Camille stays put. \u201cI only ever felt fully real when I was working,\u201d she explains early in the book, \u201cand after the workday was done I retreated into a state of minimal existence, like a robot powered down between tasks.\u201d She\u2019s a natural with the animals, though, her presence as calming to them as theirs is life-giving to her.<\/p>\n Everything begins to change for Camille when a new zookeeper, Sailor, arrives on the island. Sailor is in her 40s and had a long career at the Paris Zoo before it, too, closed down. Camille is assigned to give her the new employee tour, and the two quickly form a bond based in their deep love of, and respect for, the animals in their care.<\/p>\n It\u2019d be easy to assume that all 200 or so zookeepers on the island are there for that exact reason too, but the reality is more complicated. Zookeeping is a practical choice for some \u201cbecause it offers a better life than anything else going,\u201d Sailor points out. Zookeepers \u201cmay as well live and die surrounded by animals than in a sweatshop or war zone, right?\u201d Then, too, there\u2019s the sheer bleakness of the role: \u201cEveryone starts off enthusiastic,\u201d Camille tells Sailor, \u201cbut then, I don\u2019t know. They just sort of give up.\u201d And why wouldn\u2019t they? After all, they are aware, every single day, that the animals locked in their various enclosures are some of the, if not the, last of their kind, and they\u2019re living out the end of their species in an environment far removed from their native habitat. It\u2019s no wonder that many keepers choose to emotionally distance themselves and sink into apathy.<\/p>\n As Sailor settles into her new job on Alcatraz, she begins to shake things up, which both thrills and terrifies Camille, who has always kept her head down and followed the rules. Even more meaningful to Camille than Sailor\u2019s boundary pushing, though, is Sailor\u2019s friendship and how she includes Camille in whatever she\u2019s dreaming up: \u201cit\u2019s hard to describe to anyone who hasn\u2019t lived a life of loneliness how powerfully that casual \u2018we\u2019 worked on me.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThe Island of Last Things\u201d is Emma Sloley\u2019s second novel. <\/p>\n (Flatiron Books)<\/p>\n Camille is an interesting narrator in part because she\u2019s what some might derogatorily call a \u201cpassive\u201d character, but whom I read instead as intensely observant and watchful. It\u2019s true that she\u2019s not the instigator of most of the drama that occurs on the island once Sailor arrives, but she\u2019s often along for the ride, surprising herself over and over again by how far she\u2019ll go to maintain her friend\u2019s attention and respect. Camille has a front row seat to how Sailor is constantly working those around her \u2014 flirting, befriending, gently threatening, subtly manipulating \u2014 in order to get what she wants, and perhaps it\u2019s because what Sailor wants is always in service to the animals that Camille doesn\u2019t mind. Still, there\u2019s a bittersweet dramatic irony at play because the reader can recognize that Camille is, at least sometimes, yet another of Sailor\u2019s tools.<\/p>\n In brief chapters that alternate with the main narrative, Sailor\u2019s history comes alive in bits and pieces, and it becomes clear that she\u2019s intent on trying to smuggle animals out of the zoo to get them to a rumored sanctuary on a vast tract of land somewhere in China. But Alcatraz Zoo is owned by a billionaire (of course) and is guarded within an inch of its life, so the whole endeavor seems far-fetched and potentially impossible \u2014 yet Sailor\u2019s plan, once hatched, moves forward despite all of Camille\u2019s concerns.<\/p>\n Is the sanctuary even real? Readers never get a completely satisfactory answer to this, and the way Sailor talks about it certainly makes it sound like a fairy tale, one that she and Camille both willingly believe in because the prospect of a world without any hope is just too painful. Indeed, \u201cThe Island of Last Things\u201d doesn\u2019t sugarcoat how bad things have gotten in that future world, but Sloley refuses to let her characters succumb to despair; she is intent on highlighting the small moments of beauty, joy, and care that emerge even during disastrous, horrible times. \u201cDo me a favor, huh?\u201d Sailor asks Camille one night. \u201cPromise me you\u2019ll start imagining a better world than this one.\u201d Imagining such a world, Sloley seems to be reminding her readers, is the only way to begin the work of creating it.<\/p>\n Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel \u201cAll My Mother\u2019s Lovers\u201d and the forthcoming novel \u201cBeings.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Book Review The Island of Last Things By Emma SloleyFlatiron Books: 272 pages, $29If you buy books linked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[29046,29042,457,29040,15097,29047,96,29049,29043,29045,29048,29041,14644,4238,56,54,55,29050,71,29044],"class_list":["post-52580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-alcatraz","tag-animal-specie","tag-books","tag-camille","tag-care","tag-emma-sloley","tag-entertainment","tag-future-zookeeper","tag-island","tag-last-thing","tag-reader","tag-sailor","tag-sanctuary","tag-time","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-well-life","tag-world","tag-zoo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n