Stuart Turton, The Last Murder at the End of the World

No spoilers here, I promise.

The Last Murder at the End of the World is a remarkable book, and I won't choose to read another novel by Stuart Turton.

Image from Stuart Turton's own website

This shouldn't bother Turton in the least, since he's sold more than a million copies of his three novels so far, and he's on contract for a fourth to come out from Bloomsbury. My small self's saying so isn't meant to bother him, in any case, but to clarify for myself how I really felt about this novel.

Where to start?

It was an accidental read, let's say that. One of the book club members chose this one several months ago for the January meeting, then left me off the group email where he opted instead for Matt Haig's The Humans (which I'll read next). I'd already bought it, and I appreciate when someone else chooses my books for me and helps me escape my own vast limitations, so here we are. When I say that I won't choose to read another novel by Stuart Turton, I mean that I'll cheerfully follow the book club almost anywhere they want to go (except celebrity biography: ew), so I'll read him for them, unquestionably.

But this one was very much not for me, and I'm curious to hear why the club member decided to withdraw his choice.

I should've worried, I guess, when I saw just how acclaimed this novel's own packaging said that it was. The front cover has a blurb from fellow HarperCollins novelist A.J. Finn, and the back cover features five more novelists whose books have come out from the big five imprints: Benjamin Stevenson, Will Dean, C.J. Tudor, Adam Simcox, and Gareth Rubin. Inside the book, you'll find ten blurbs for this novel: the same five from the back cover, plus five more from major-press novelists. There are two for his previous, The Devil and the Dark Water, then eighteen (!!?!?) more for his debut The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Only four of those twenty blurbs aren't from novelists, and once you exclude repetitions, this softcover edition of The Last Murder at the End of the World is carrying praise from twenty-four novelists.

I haven't read a single novel by a single one of those twenty-four novelists.

As I said above, I am a small self, by which I mean a small person with a deliberately narrow range of things I'll choose to read slowly and with passion. I read a great deal of whatever it is that I'm reading, but the world's a big and book-stuffed place. I'm confident that I'll never read dozens of books that could well deserve to be among the best things I would otherwise have read. My ignorance of these twenty-five authors (including Turton, before this) might therefore be meaningless, and it's often no more than a sign of my pettiness.

Four hundred words into this comment, I can't help noticing, and I haven't said a damned thing about the book that's my alleged subject.

The Last Murder at the End of the World is densely plotted, with impressive world-building and a cast of distinct characters. These are good things.

It's science fiction, more or less, in its core concept: an island contains the last beings on the planet, a small group of people under 60 living an oddly medieval life under the observation and leadership of three centenarian elders with wildly advanced knowledge of science. The island is surrounded by a dark fog filled with lethally swarming insects, and the world is otherwise uninhabited. it takes a long time before we get much explanation, which is fine, and there are early clues about sabotage and climate change and  so on. This is all promising.

There's a map, which is often a good sign, and a cast of characters (ditto), and we immediately meet some thorny, complicated, unpredictable characters. Again, all good news.

At bottom, though, The Last Murder at the End of the World is a murder mystery. TLMatEotW pretends to be a novel of ideas, but for me, these big ideas are there only to serve the mystery, rather than to be thought about. TLMatEotW wants to seem like a character-driven novel, but the characters only serve the mystery. TLMatEotW is immersive, and it's simultaneously dystopian and utopian, and it presents us with a world that's beyond our understanding but something like a possible future, but again, that's all there only to serve the mystery.

For readers who want a murder mystery, especially a murder mystery that seems to be more than that, and I assume that the twenty-four other authors whose blurbs have bejewelled The Last Murder at the End of the World are among their number, that's great. Genuinely, I'm glad they've got something to please them.

I'm not saying all this to say that I'm better than whatever proportion of those who've bought the million copies of Turton novels are happy with their purchases. Similarly, I'm not saying I'm better than Turton's blurbists, and since I've never written a novel, I'm certainly no better than Turton himself.

But this novel is absolutely not for me. The Last Murder at the End of the World wasn't unenjoyable, and I'm sure other readers will find further rewards than I did, but enjoyment is well down the list of satisfactions I'm seeking when I read.