"The Last Town on Earth": Quarantine and Quandary

"The Last Town on Earth"
by Thomas Mullen
Random House, 394 pp., $23.95

When is killing justified? This is the question posed by Thomas Mullen's provocative first novel, "The Last Town on Earth" (in bookstores Tuesday), a story grounded in Pacific Northwest history.

Make that History, with a capital H.

Mullen, an East Coaster now living in Washington, D.C., almost stacks the deck too high with his tale of a fictional timber town that tries to insulate itself from the 1918 flu epidemic. In addition to that infamous event, he throws in the radical labor group known as the Wobblies and the impact of World War I. Somehow these disparate elements come together convincingly in fictional Commonwealth, a one-industry outpost and utopian experiment that's nestled in the mountains east of Seattle.

Felling trees and planing boards are dangerous occupations, but workers' early attempts to change that were met with stiff resistance from management. In "The Last Town on Earth," the Everett Massacre of 1916 — a real event in which at least seven people died while protesting unsafe working conditions — sparks the fateful decision that sets the story in motion. Disgusted with his brothers' approval of the heavy-handed ways in which the strikers are put down, the idealistic Charles Worthy sells his interest in his family's lumber mill and starts his own enterprise.

Charles and his left-leaning wife, Rebecca, move with their children to the town they've created, and the workers follow. At first, Commonwealth and its mill seem to be on their way to prosperity. Then the flu begins to spread in neighboring communities.

At a town meeting, residents agree that the best way to protect themselves is to establish a temporary quarantine: No one leaves Commonwealth, and no one enters. The remedy sounds failproof, but it's not.

As the story opens, the teenage Philip Worthy, Charles' adopted son, is standing guard at the town entrance with a friend and mill worker named Graham Stone. When a bedraggled soldier appears, pleading for food and shelter, Graham warns him away. When the soldier advances, Graham shoots him dead.

It's a dramatic scene, the first in a string of events that will provoke dissent and criminal acts in a town designed to bring out the best in people — and unprepared to manage them at their worst.

A chorus of characters weighs in as the story proceeds, including a thuggish group from nearby Timber Falls that ostensibly shows up to arrest draft dodgers — but is really intent on stomping out Worthy's social and economic reforms.

A brisk pace and good storytelling bring to life a historical period that seems as fraught and fascinating as our own. But as much as this helps to obscure the book's didactic qualities, "The Last Town on Earth" is no breezy read, as it asks readers not only to consider the issue of justifiable homicide, but to ponder how difficult times can change well-meaning people.

"It was the invisible things that were most dangerous in the world," one mill worker notes, summing up not only the threat caused by the flu virus, but the insidious nature of deprivation and fear.

Not surprisingly, marketing efforts for "The Last Town on Earth" are directed at high-school and college literature teachers, with the specific hope that colleges will pick the book as a freshman-year read. This is smart, because "The Last Town on Earth" asks important questions and has contemporary resonance, given the AIDS crisis, the threat of terrorism and our current state of political polarization.

All the same, regarding the book's basic premise, reader beware: Although Mullen suggests that Commonwealth set its own fate by trying to wall itself off from the world, this seems too simplistic. Sometimes larger forces — epidemics, war, a global economy — can doom the best-laid plans.

Ellen Emry Heltzel is a writer and book critic in Portland. Her Internet column can be found at www.goodhousekeeping.com/bookbabes.