Review: The Last Woman in the World
Gaby Meares
Inga Simpson’s books all demonstrate her love of the natural world, and her horror at how we are treating it. In The Last Woman in the World she goes one step further, showing us a world that has been all but destroyed by our foolishness: first with fire due to climate change, then pandemic and finally a mysterious death that is causing mass destruction.
Rachel deliberately lives alone. She is an artist; creating beautiful objects with glass. She’s traumatised by the fires that swept the country and has removed herself from the outside world, only seeing her sister and another friend occasionally. When a young woman with her baby hammers on her door one morning, she wants nothing to do with them. But she hears the terror in the mother’s voice and lets them in. The world has been swept by a mysterious death that kills thousands in an instant. Together, Rachel and Hannah must leave the safety of her home to travel to Canberra with baby Isaiah to find him antibiotics, and also find Rachel’s beloved sister.
This novel is relentless. The horrors they encounter on their journey are straight out of a Stephen King book. I couldn’t put it down. I was totally invested in these women and their journey. Rachel’s affinity with the natural world is visceral and the trauma she feels from the destruction wrought by the bushfires is physical:
Another ten minutes and she would have lost everything. Not that any of that would have mattered, not compared to what had been lost. Billions of trees and animals. The pain rushed up in her chest, her heartbeat too fast, breathing too shallow. As if the land was her body.
The mysterious disease is never fully explained, but I saw it as a physical manifestation of despair, sweeping through the population. Why did some survive? The answer to that question is, of course, the cure for mankind. But you have to read the book to find out!