Ron Charles reviews ‘The Last Werewolf’ by Glen Duncan
On one level, of course, this is just James Bond with dog breath. Duncan gives us double-crossing secret agents, exotic locales, cliffhangers that drop down to other cliffhangers, lots of macho weaponry and fancy automobiles, and several very beautiful, very willing women. But what makes this a breed apart is the author’s deliciously gory wit and philosophical turn of mind. (Clearly, the animal kingdom is in ascendancy: It was only a few months ago that we got Benjamin Hale’s fantastically smart “Evolution of Bruno Littlemore,” about an eloquent, horny chimp.)
As Jake eviscerates his enemies and dodges silver bullets, he tries to find some way to overcome his spiritual agony, crippling loneliness and self-loathing. But how can he remain sane when he craves to kill the ones he loves? “The hunger, in its vicious simplicity, teaches you how to be a werewolf,” he notes, and that curse ravages his moral sense. Not to take anything away from that other Jacob’s abs, but it’s impossible to imagine Stephenie Meyer’s werewolf saying, “You eat fast, in a worsening temper, with contempt for God’s creative vulgarity in yoking consciousness to meat.”
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Ron came to The Post in 2005 from the Christian Science Monitor, where he was the Book Editor and lead critic. He lives in Bethesda with his wife, an English teacher at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.
And what a well-read beast this last werewolf is. He can’t resist biting at any literary or pop culture reference at just the right comic or poignant moment. As his determined killer moves in, for instance, Jake says, “We’re like Connie and Mellors at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, apart, chaste, happily purifying ourselves in honour of the coming consummation.” Feasting on one poor victim, he can’t get the refrain from Tennyson’s “Mariana” out of his mind. From Norman Mailer to “Starsky & Hutch,” from Matthew Arnold to “Charlie’s Angels,” Jake’s journal is a riot of allusions, including a chapter that begins, brilliantly, “Reader, I ate him.”
You might think that Hollywood special effects have dulled the thrill of seeing a man transform into a wolf. After all, it’s been 30 years since “An American Werewolf in London” won an Academy Award for best makeup, and the CGI wizards have grown only more amazing since then. But Duncan demonstrates the incontestable magic of words on the page. His descriptions of Jake’s monthly change — “an impossible accommodation,” when the monster tears itself through the soft fabric of his human body — are moving and terrifying, raised beyond the scene’s inherent corniness by the grandeur of his language and his ability to convey the horror of living alongside that ravenous canine mind. Forced into inarticulate hunger on his first startling night, Jake “dropped onto the floor dizzied by the inrushing night’s symphony of smells. . . . Matter, raped and rearranged, murmured its trauma in the quivering cells.”
Among the weird novels that Duncan has published, a werewolf isn’t a particularly odd narrator. Over the past decade, he’s given us a devil (“I, Lucifer”), a possessed man (“Weathercock”) and even a corpse (“Death of an Ordinary Man”). But this one, arriving during the Black Mass of America’s obsession with occult romances and adventures, may be his breakout book. “It’s a ridiculous story, of course,” Jake admits halfway through, “but history’s full of ridiculous stories.” He’s right, but few of them have been such bloody fun as this one.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. He reviews books every Wednesday.
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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