Reviewed by Rod McLary
Jane Harper has now written six books all of which have been set in outback Australia and all within communities on the decline. Last One Out is no exception and while the earlier books may have been thrillers in all senses of the word, this one is more a slow burn gradually building to a final resolution which brings with it some sense of completion.
Set in the small town of Carralon Ridge – somewhere west of Sydney – the story centres on the disappearance of Sam Crowley on the night before his twenty-first birthday. In spite of extensive searching, he is never located and his disappearance and its effect on his family and the local community reverberate through the novel. But his disappearance is set against the slow decline of the town with the ever-encroaching coal mine on its doorstep. Gradually, families are selling up and moving away leaving growing anger and grief from those who are determined to stay on.
Perhaps metaphorically, all the action in the novel is underscored by the constant hum of the mine machinery penetrating every corner of the town – punctuated only by the noisy and heavy trucks roaring through the back roads of the town. There are references to the hum throughout the narrative underscoring the growing realisation that the town no longer belongs to the residents. And – as with all Jane Harper novels – the landscape and the deteriorating houses play a significant and almost visceral role in the narrative. In just one brief passage, the author vividly brings to life the sadness of a community in decline.
The home’s weatherboard façade was barely clinging on to its last coat of paint, the cream colour flaking away like a scab to show the raw, grey wood beneath. The home gaped open, its threshold unguarded, vulnerable and exposed to the elements. [2]
But the house described above – with its missing front door – has another role to play in the narrative which becomes apparent only towards the novel’s conclusion.
Sam’s disappearance and the differing ways his parents – Rowena and Griffith – respond to it eventually drives them apart with Rowena relocating to Sydney and Griffith remaining in the town. Each year though, Rowena and their daughter and Sam’s younger sister Della return to Carralon Ridge for a memorial service for Sam. Over five years, the service has grown and now a small number of townspeople join in.
On the fifth anniversary of Sam’s disappearance, Rowena senses that some of the townspeople know more than they are prepared to acknowledge and this knowledge – just beyond Rowena’s grasp – hums along with the mine machinery as ever-present but equally as elusive.
While Last One Out may not have the dramatic impact some of the author’s earlier novels have, it does bring to life both the slow decline of a community and the throbbing tensions between those who choose to leave and those who choose to stay. There is both grief and guilt hidden in the tensions and it is only when they are brought into the light that there is some resolution.
It is indeed a fine novel and well recommended.
Last One Out
[2025]
by Jane Harper
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 978 1760 78396 9
$34.99; 373pp