Award-winning West Australian writer, Brooke Dunnell, published her second novel earlier this year, turning her pen to the climate crisis and modern motherhood.
While her first novel, the Fogarty Literary Award winning The Glass House explored themes of aging parents and suburban life, the follow-up, Last Best Chance has a bit more of a futuristic view.
Following two characters who both find themselves foreigners in an un-named European city for different reasons, the two protagonists of this novel are both running out of time, and both running out of chances to achieve their goals. For Rachel, this is motherhood — something that, as a single woman aged 42, feels a little impossible, until she discovers the IVF program in the unnamed European city is much more affordable than ones she could access locally.
For Jess, who has moved overseas to be with Viktor, this is her big career break. Jess wants to write, and when a green-energy expo comes to town, bringing with it a reclusive tech-billionaire, she sees an opportunity for an exclusive. Running alongside these two narratives is a quiet undercurrent of imminent climate catastrophe, and the question of if either of these two goals really matter, if the planet is doomed.
Dunnell writes interior lives skilfully, letting the reader inhabit the most private moments of Rachel and Jess’s lives, and allowing them to feel these character’s desperation. We go with Rachel to invasive medical appointments, and a mortifying coffee catch up with her mother. We feel the polite, but uncomfortable, sympathy of the staff at the IVF clinics she attends, as well as the cold pinch of the instruments. As for Jess, we go with her to her many jobs, feel the fatigue as she and her partner struggle to make ends meet. And for both of them, we feel their loneliness, their otherness.
It is no small thing to invent a country but make it feel like a real place, but this too Dunnell has achieved, allowing her the freedom to invent laws surrounding IVF processes and create quaint idiosyncrasies for the people such as a tendency to slurp sweet tea out of bowls.
The landscape she evokes is one of beauty, with Jess often marvelling at the cloudfall phenomenon that she can see as she looks out of her window into the mountains. This beauty, juxtaposed with the threat of environmental disaster if big tech companies get their way, is a powerful statement. Yet while the book is a climate novel, it is also many more things, and rather than being didactic in its environmental message, it is just realistic, choosing to acknowledge a truth that many of us — and the characters– now have to live with.
The twin narratives eventually — inevitably– intertwine, and while the two women don’t necessarily see eye to eye on things, they have a brief significance in each others’ lives which is deeply satisfying to read. While the ending to the novel is left somewhat open, all of the information needed to make up your own mind is there.
This is a sparkling, sensitive follow up to Dunnell’s debut.
FOUR AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Last Best Chance by Brooke Dunnell is out now from Fremantle Press. Get yourself a copy from your local bookstore HERE.
