Review: Last Woman on Earth
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 11, 2011
SPOILERS:Cass wakes up one morning and everybody else on earth is missing.  She has no electrical power, but mechanical devices still work.  There are songbirds, but no chickens, a mare, but no stallion, there appears to be no pattern to the disappearances.  She travels toward home with the mare, occasionally encountering some frightening and ambiguous power, connected to an extinct moa, which watches her, stalks her, and frightens her.  As she moves through the landscape, changes continue, buildings and pavement disappear and fully grown trees appear overnight.  Grass grows several feet tall in a single night.It eventually becomes clear that only native New Zealand animals have survived, but with odd and unusual exceptions.  In the zoo, kiwis and native lizards are all that are left.The mare, named Ezzy, is Cass' companion and confidant.  Halfway through the book, Cass encounters another human being, the Maori woman Pania.  The comfort of another breathing human overcomes Cass' heterosexuality, and the two fall in love with each other.As a previous reviewer pointed out, it is when Cass and Pania finally get together that the story becomes suddenly gripping and irresistable.Between volcanos, earthquakes and some dark ambiguous power stalking them, Cass and Pania survive and grow closer.Then one day Cass discovers that Ezzy is pregnant.  Then she and Pania find a dog who is giving birth to puppies.  Then Cass realizes that the cramps and sickness she had during her first post-apocalyptic period were actually a miscarriage.  When she presents her findings to Pania, Pania reveals that she was in the middle of being raped when the "change" happened.The ladies conclude that the only non-native New Zealand mammals to survive were females who were in the actual act of conception at the instant of the change.Finally there is a scene where the amorphous power heralded by the moa, comes to Cass with the appearance of her disappeared lover, and she gets pregnant.  Pania reveals that at the same time, someone or something in the shape of her disappeared female lover also had sex with her in the ocean, and Pania is also pregnant.  The conclusion is that this stalking power is a deity who can change shape.The whole gods/goddess aspect is interesting. It's also disturbing in some ways, but then I have to stop and think, compared to waking up and finding everybody on earth missing, the word disturbing has taken on new connotations. The moa connection is an interesting symbol. By the way, did New Zealand house any other ratites? Like emus or cassowaries or ostriches? Obviously they had kiwis. Moas were up to 12 feet tall and 500 pounds. Only Elephant Birds were bigger.It disturbs me that this deity-thing is undefined and the interaction with Pania reminds me of the rape of Callisto. If you remember the story, Callisto was one of Artimis' lovers, and a virgin. Zeus followed her into the woods and appeared to her as Artimis and was making love to her, when all of a sudden a penis appeared and he raped her. In some accounts, she continues to believe that it was Artimis who impregnated her."But as Amphis, writer of comedies [Athenian C4th B.C.], says, Jupiter [Zeus], assuming the form of Diana [Artemis], followed the girl as if to aid her in hunting, and embraced her when out of sight of the rest. Questioned by Diana as to the reason for her swollen form, she replied that it was the goddess' fault, and because of this reply, Diana changed her into the shape we mentioned above."This is from Pseudo-Hyginius' Astronomica 2:1. So pseudo-Hyginus claims it is the lost comedy written by Amphis in the 4th century BC which first claims that Callisto is so stupid that she continues to believe that Zeus really was Artimis and that it was Artimis who impregnated her.Ovid's version is clearer and more complete. He plainly tells how Zeus is making love to Callisto ("kissed her many times, and strained her in his arms") who thinks he is Artimis, and only "when his ardent love was known to her, she struggled to excape from his embrace:" Metamorphoses 2:409.I take that to mean that Callisto is accustomed to Artimis touching her in an intimate way, and until she realizes that she is being penetrated by a penis, she believes she is safe in Artimis' arms.You can see how the tree-god coming to Pania in the form of an accustomed female lover sounds a lot like the rape of Callisto. I realize that it was written as if it were consensual, but even if Pania wasn't deceived (after all he/she appeared to Pania as a dead former lover, not as Cass the current lover, which could have deceived Pania about who she was having sex with) the disguise does have elements of rape by deception. And the clouded mind has elements of coersion, and the resulting pregnancy has elements of using both women for his/her own purposes, sort of as if they were brood mares.There are a lot of implications to this part of the story. I get the impression from the atmosphere of that part of the story that the author herself is ambivalent about the children's conception. She is very careful to relate Pania's story, at least, in non-emotional words. Even Cass' encounter is devoid of the words of emotion which characterizes every previous encounter with the tree-god. She is careful to avoid saying whether either lady enjoys the encounter or not, whether they consider the encounter a rape, whether they are frightened or outraged, whether they fear or appreciate what happened.Actually, there is nothing in either encounter to explicitly express rape. There is the dream-like atmosphere that implies the women may not have had a choice or were overpowered, there is the shape change which implies an element of deception, and, most important to me, there is the previous stalking and fear. It's not explicitly clear that the deity who impregnates the women is the same one who stalks and frightens them before. Maybe there is two different deities who both use a moa as a herald.She is also careful to avoid saying whether the tree-god is the one responsible for the whole disappearance of everyone else. The implication is that he/she is the one who fertilizes the females, and only conceiving females were spared the disappearance, so he/she has some connection to the disappearance itself.So, in my view, this book has depths beyond what appears on the surface, and leaves more unsaid than it says.The gradual change from city back into primeval forest also has strange and un-explicated implications. There is a lot of the story where the reader has to just forget his questions and go with the drama.Over all I love the book. I'd like to understand the last sentence, though. Did Cass and Pania actually find other mothers and children, or is it a visionary or symbolic closing sentence? Or am I supposed to create my own meaning out of it?