Hundreds to thousands of animal species go extinct every year, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and things are projected to get even worse if climate change continues unabated. A new novel by U.S.-based Australian writer Emma Sloley, “The Island of Last Things,” imagines a time in the nearish future when not only animals but whole ecosystems of living things have been wiped out, leaving a handful of surviving zoos around the globe attempting to preserve the species in their care. Except that those zoos close, one by one, due to a multitude of reasons: insufficient funding, a movement protesting the care and feeding of (nonhuman) animals in a time of mass human suffering and a deadly strain of Candida spreading through the wildlife population. The last remaining zoo sits on Alcatraz Island, inhabiting the grounds and structures of the former prison.
“The Island of Last Things” is largely narrated by Camille, a woman in her mid-20s who prefers the company of animals to people and has worked on Alcatraz for pretty much the entirety of her adulthood. Unlike most of the other workers, who travel to the mainland every Sunday, Camille stays put. “I only ever felt fully real when I was working,” she explains early in the book, “and after the workday was done I retreated into a state of minimal existence, like a robot powered down between tasks.” She’s a natural with the animals, though, her presence as calming to them as theirs is life-giving to her.
Everything begins to change for Camille when a new zookeeper, Sailor, arrives on the island. Sailor is in her 40s and had a long career at the Paris Zoo before it, too, closed down. Camille is assigned to give her the new employee tour, and the two quickly form a bond based in their deep love of, and respect for, the animals in their care.
It’d be easy to assume that all 200 or so zookeepers on the island are there for that exact reason too, but the reality is more complicated. Zookeeping is a practical choice for some “because it offers a better life than anything else going,” Sailor points out. Zookeepers “may as well live and die surrounded by animals than in a sweatshop or war zone, right?” Then, too, there’s the sheer bleakness of the role: “Everyone starts off enthusiastic,” Camille tells Sailor, “but then, I don’t know. They just sort of give up.” And why wouldn’t they? After all, they are aware, every single day, that the animals locked in their various enclosures are some of the, if not the, last of their kind, and they’re living out the end of their species in an environment far removed from their native habitat. It’s no wonder that many keepers choose to emotionally distance themselves and sink into apathy.
As Sailor settles into her new job on Alcatraz, she begins to shake things up, which both thrills and terrifies Camille, who has always kept her head down and followed the rules. Even more meaningful to Camille than Sailor’s boundary pushing, though, is Sailor’s friendship and how she includes Camille in whatever she’s dreaming up: “it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived a life of loneliness how powerfully that casual ‘we’ worked on me.”
Camille is an interesting narrator in part because she’s what some might derogatorily call a “passive” character, but whom I read instead as intensely observant and watchful. It’s true that she’s not the instigator of most of the drama that occurs on the island once Sailor arrives, but she’s often along for the ride, surprising herself over and over again by how far she’ll go to maintain her friend’s attention and respect. Camille has a front row seat to how Sailor is constantly working those around her — flirting, befriending, gently threatening, subtly manipulating — in order to get what she wants, and perhaps it’s because what Sailor wants is always in service to the animals that Camille doesn’t mind. Still, there’s a bittersweet dramatic irony at play because the reader can recognize that Camille is, at least sometimes, yet another of Sailor’s tools.
In brief chapters that alternate with the main narrative, Sailor’s history comes alive in bits and pieces, and it becomes clear that she’s intent on trying to smuggle animals out of the zoo to get them to a rumored sanctuary on a vast tract of land somewhere in China. But Alcatraz Zoo is owned by a billionaire (of course) and is guarded within an inch of its life, so the whole endeavor seems far-fetched and potentially impossible — yet Sailor’s plan, once hatched, moves forward despite all of Camille’s concerns.
Is the sanctuary even real? Readers never get a completely satisfactory answer to this, and the way Sailor talks about it certainly makes it sound like a fairy tale, one that she and Camille both willingly believe in because the prospect of a world without any hope is just too painful. Indeed, “The Island of Last Things” doesn’t sugarcoat how bad things have gotten in that future world, but Sloley refuses to let her characters succumb to despair; she is intent on highlighting the small moments of beauty, joy, and care that emerge even during disastrous, horrible times. “Do me a favor, huh?” Sailor asks Camille one night. “Promise me you’ll start imagining a better world than this one.” Imagining such a world, Sloley seems to be reminding her readers, is the only way to begin the work of creating it.
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”
The post Alcatraz is home to the last remaining zoo in Emma Sloley’s resilient ‘The Island of Last Things’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
