The novel is set in America divided into two factions: the Dakota Membership, presumably consisting of North and South Dakota, and the Still United, a union of other states of the former United States. Led by President Damian Paxton, the Dakota Membership has evolved into a tightly controlled society organized around surveillance and an elaborate system of rewards and “personal advancement”. It has become difficult to distinguish the government’s interest in protecting its citizens from its interest in regulating them: Children and adults may be evaluated for other undesirable traits such as rebelliousness and originality and “sent to personal development centers,” in-utero genetic editing is widely available, and the culture of “augmented evolution” is on the rise.
“Last Days” takes place over the course of a week and moves between eighteen different characters; The multitude of perspectives at times destabilizes the text. There’s a sketchy quality to Scott’s work: reviewers have noted a variety of typos, clichés (the backseat of a car is “quiet as the grave”), and palm-to-forehead puns (“shit” and “President priss” might be fun on first encounter; repeated mentions become tiring). Maybe, Vanity Fair Based on the first few chapters, he implied that the reason Scott published his own book was because the novel was not edited properly.
But getting rid of the feeling that “The Last Days” is a draft rather than a finished product means shaking the suspicion that it is a movie script disguised as a novel. The fast-paced action sequences and high dialogue quotient feel optimized for a movie or miniseries. In a scene with vivid, almost cinematic efficiency, Liv Lockhart, an event planner working for the Dakota Membership, leads her son, who has apparently tested positive for rebelliousness, into a snow pit near a safe house. As the intrigue gains momentum, she tries to conceal her son’s movements, even leading dogs through the snow to cover his tracks, then drugs a high-ranking official at a party with an Ambien-laced mojito, steals his zip drive, and retreats to the bathroom, where she uses a citrus knife to pierce his chest and remove the tracker he had placed on his body like all government employees in the Dakota reservations. Elsewhere, a Still United agent named Jonah is training a mouse to carry out an explosive mission.
“I despise the harsh and extreme as much as you do,” Morrison once wrote in a letter to Scott, his research assistant and protégé at Princeton. But in “Last Days” both harshness and excess are on display: the eighteen-character cast is so frequently entangled and their political opinions so frequently stated that one gets the jarring feeling of simultaneously absorbing an overworked text and its inadequate summary.
Although the novel does not have a central protagonist, Liv is given one of the more comprehensive storylines. She is the daughter of a charismatic figure named Magnus Lockhart, founder of the Church of the Long Tomorrow, a Scientology-like cult whose presence lingers over the book. At the age of twelve, Liv escaped from her father’s underground compound during a firefight with the armed forces, crawling through a ventilation duct as her father intoned: “Look how far they will go to control you. Stay with me; I will protect you.” Years later, this history marks a frightening beginning for the woman Liv has become: the woman who learns to survive by going through another system of oppression while helping to make its demands seem appealing. As a mother, Liv has made herself indispensable to the Paxton government to protect her son, accepting an event planning job at the Bureau of Rewards for Valor, a government agency located in a haunted hotel for some reason, in the hopes of ensuring her son’s “survival uninjured.”
Liv’s plight is shared by the other parents in the novel: Gary Handler, Liv’s colleague with whom she continues an affair, has also taken up the government position, partly to give his wife and daughter some freedom. And Enrique, the President’s cook, hates the man he serves but accepts the job to provide “better medical care” for his daughter. However, as Scott tries to show, resistance can become an instrument of the state; Even fraudulent actions undertaken for the love of a child can have unforeseen consequences. The epilogue makes the point with brutal frankness: The Bureau of Rewards for Courage, eventually revealed to be a front of the resistance, enables “the defeat of a dictator” as well as “the arrest and genetic mutilation of half a million people.” The moral universe of the novel is full of such double exposures.