FICTION: Last Town on Earth

[Guest guest]

Quarantine & quandary

A timber town tries to insulate itself from the 1918 flu epidemic,

creating some agonizing moral dilemmas.

Ellen Emry Heltzel, Special to the Star Tribune

The Last Town on Earth

By: Mullen.

Publisher: Random House, 416 pages, $23.95.

When is killing justified? This is the question posed by

Mullen's provocative first novel, " The Last Town on Earth, " a story

grounded in American history. Make that history with a capital H.

Mullen, an East Coaster now living in Washington, D.C., stacks the

deck almost 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 the fictional Commonwealth, a

one-industry outpost and utopian experiment nestled in the mountains

east of Seattle.

Felling trees and planing boards are both dangerous occupations, but

early attempts to change that in the Pacific Northwest were met with

stiff resistance. 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 Worthy sells his interest in his family's mill and

starts his own enterprise.

and his left-leaning wife, , 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 inoculate

themselves is to establish a temporary quarantine: No one leaves

Commonwealth and no one enters. The remedy sounds fail-proof, but

it's not.

As the story opens, the teenage Philip Worthy, ' 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 one that is 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, which shows up ostensibly to

arrest draft dodgers but really is 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

these help to obscure the book's didactic qualities, " The Last Town

on Earth " is no breezy read. Rather, it asks readers to consider not

only the issue of justifiable homicide, but also how difficult times

can change well-meaning people.

" It was the invisible things that were dangerous in the world, " one

mill worker notes, summing up the threat caused by the flu virus and

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. This is

smart, because " The Last Town on Earth " asks important questions and -

- given the spread of AIDS, the threat of terrorism and our current

state of political polarization -- has contemporary resonance.

All the same, regarding the book's basic premise, reader beware. In

the closing chapter, Mullen seems to suggest that Commonwealth had

decided its own fate by walling itself off from the rest of the

world. From this reader's chair, it doesn't feel so simple. Instead,

the ultimate fate of even this make-believe utopian village seems to

be determined less by individual choices than by larger forces beyond

the town's control.

Pogo said, " We have met the enemy, and he is us. " But is this always

true? In " The Last Town on Earth, " it looks like a two-front war,

coming from within and without. Maybe that's why people get so scared.

http://www.startribune.com/384/story/662845.html