For the first time since I read the first three volumes of J.K Rowling's Harry Potter series in less than a week, I've come across a page-turner, whose fast-paced, action-packed, intriguing, and dangerously familiar plot compelled me to finish all 400 pages on two successive nights. It kept me between the covers from around midnight to daybreak, oblivious to the passing of time, until the first light poured through my windows.
Last Light by Alex Scarrow, published by Onion House in London in 2007, doesn't appear to be anything to be proud about like Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, Ken Follet's Key to Rebecca, or even Sidney Sheldon's The Stand before the latter's name descended into the realm of B-rated horror flicks. Maybe this is because Scarrow has only two other titles under his belt, the earlier novel A Thousand Suns and the more recent October Skies or because I spotted one proofreading error too many in Last Light. (daw korek! :))
If it were a movie, unless it starred some heavyweight like Jake Gyllenhaal or Matt Damon, there is a likelihood it will only pass for a film-made-for-TV or some B movie, that is, judging strictly from the way the author incorporated humor and some sappy emotional indulgence into the plot line. It kind of reminds me of James Cameron's Titanic, corny at least where the fictitious romance between Jack and Rose was inserted into history. Nevertheless, the Leonardo de Caprio-starrer grossed over $600 million, one of the best movies of all time in terms of box-office draw and that's because, I believe, based on the plot alone, it was destined to be something big.
Which is also what's going for the conspiracy theory thriller Last Light. It's so big the characters take the reader across the world, from New York to Al-Bayji in Iraq, from Turkey to Shepherd's Bush in London. But these geographical locations barely only scratch the surface. Last Light hits home, wherever home is, Iloilo included, as long as home means there is water on the taps; there is electricity to run the basic necessities like light, refrigerator, and TV set and computers; there is fuel to cook for food, to move the cars where they need to be, such as away from danger; and there is security from strangers, particularly when these strangers are desperate for food, water or power.
What turns the world amuck in Last Light is oil or to be more precise, modern society's overdependence on oil that is mostly produced in the least stable of regions in the world, the Middle East. In a nutshell, Scarrow's story revolves around what scientists call Peak Oil, "the point in the time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of extraction enters terminal decline." The term was first coined in 1956, by American geoscientist M.King Hubbert, whose logistic model, the Hubbert Peak Theory, has since been used with great accuracy to predict the peak and decline of oil production in many countries.
More alarming is the growing interdependence among nations, at least based on how Scarrow has realistically imagined an oil shortage to lead to the end of the world as we know it. Whereas the recent Olympic fever has made us think in terms of "One World, One Dream," Last Light makes you dread the fact that because we are increasingly depending on each other for the most basic of our needs, all nations in the world are now trapped in a tinderbox labeled globalization. All it takes to set it off is a series of riots in Saudi Arabia, as happens in this thriller, that is quickly followed by economic collapse and social breakdown in the rest of the world that needs oil to operate even the most essential aspects of life, such as the traffic lights and the communication and security systems. While trying to read the book as fast as the turn of events in the story, it occurred to me, however, that there were still places in the Philippines to turn to should peak oil plunge us back to the Dark Ages. I was thinking of places like Polillo, a remote island on Polillio Strait in the northeastern region of the archipelago. There we can still raise our own chickens and even pigs, plant our vegetables, make fire our of dried-out wood gathered from the forest, and source our water from the deep underground. We can start all over again.
It's still possible, right? That is if, granting that no plane or boat could take us there, we could swim or take a raft across roughly 29 kilometers from the eastern coast of Luzon to Polillio. Of course it is possible, but only after the toughest of us, over 90 million Filipinos and tens of millions more from neighboring countries, have claimed ownership over what little space there is left outside the cities. Before that, we can only expect chaos of cataclysmic, apocalyptic proportions, where majority will have to die to make room for a new world.
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