BETHANY CLIFT | INTERVIEW
Last One At The Party, the debut novel by Bethany Clift, has been tipped as one of the best reads of 2021. Carl Marsh was hooked from the first few pages, lost the track of time, and wanted to find out more from her – so he did.
This book is based around a world-ending virus, and mentions COVID-19 a little – though this was presumably added in later edits, as your introduction notes that you came up with the story idea in 2018. Why did you think that was necessary?
Last One At The Party is grounded in realism; everything that happens within the novel could happen in the real world, and in some cases since the beginning of 2020 has. My editor and I made a decision early on that, in order to keep this realism, it had to include reference to COVID-19 – the novel is not set in a parallel universe, it is set in our real world.
So I had to guess what would happen next, how COVID-19 would affect humanity in the long run, and then weave this through my narrative. It was very important to me because I wanted the reader to be able to associate fully with my protagonist, to share her experience, and in order for this to happen I had to reflect what had been happening in their lives, in the real world.
It is also a book about how other people can change over time when faced with desperation and fear. What’s behind your process of depicting these character flaws in print?
It’s hard to do a redemptive arc with only one character and no-one else to help her ‘discover’ who she really wants to be – apart from [the unnamed character’s dog] Lucky of course! She had to be both her own antagonist and protagonist. I think there is an element of survival instinct in there – once she decides she will survive she has to face certain truths about how she has lived her life up until that point, both before and after 6DM [name of the pandemic, short for ‘six days maximum’ in reference to how long it takes to kill].
It’s interesting because, since publication of the book, I have had wildly varying reactions to her as a character from readers who can completely empathise with her reaction to the situation and those for whom her initial actions are anathema, but I hope that all readers feel some connection to her by the end of the novel. In order to show the changes that do occur, I thought it was important to see how she became the person that she was before 6DM – hence the flashbacks – and then how she became the person she wanted and needed to be after. And I really don’t think her journey is over by the end of the book!
What books or films influenced you to write LOATP?
I love dystopian and sci-fi and apocalyptic books, have read a lot of them and was influenced by them all! I was directly influenced by my love of The Handmaid’s Tale, I Am Legend, The Road, The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later and The Stand – but the main reason I wrote Last One At The Party was because I wanted to read a book like it and couldn’t find one.
I wanted to read about someone completely unsuited to being the last person alive: not a scientist or survivalist, someone normal like you or me, and I wanted to read about how they survived on their own without the help of the government or the army or a friendly somehow incredibly apocalypse-accomplished bunch of strangers! My goal was always to stick to the idea that after her husband dies she never speaks to another living person. And she doesn’t.
I love any end-of-the-world type content and can see this making a cracking film or TV series – is that something possibly in the pipeline?
Yes! The TV rights have been sold to Scott Free Films who are in the process of adapting the novel for television at the moment, which is really exciting!
The book has quite a few horrifying bits, but you mix in some comedy moments – some made me laugh out loud, then re-read in case I doubted why I should be laughing.
There’s only so much misery that I can write and that the reader can take! So many times in life, our gut reaction to pain and misery is to greet it with disbelieving laughter. That’s why the British invented irony – did we invent irony? It feels like we should have – so that we could take any awful situation and squeeze comedy out of it. I didn’t want to alienate the reader with pure misery.
The overall theme of the novel is hope; that where there is life, there is hope. It is very hard to have a theme of hope if the misery is unrelenting. Also, there is a bit in the novel that involves a dead body with flatulence, and if there is one thing that my kids have taught me it is that farting is always funny.
This is your debut novel; from my past experience of chatting with authors about their debuts, I wondered how much of yourself is in the main character…
Not as much as people probably think and more than I would like my parents to know about! I think everything that you write is partly autobiographical – it is very hard to write meaningfully about emotions that you haven’t experienced. The trick, for me, is to take that safe and sometimes pedestrian experience and push it until it becomes something that is more than your small existence, until it becomes something that resonates and others can relate to.
The section where the main character takes cocaine for the first time, and her description of the experience, includes probably the longest sentence I have ever read before a full stop appears. It’s a real Spud-in-Trainspotting moment! How many attempts did it take you to write that paragraph?
One! I wrote the entire paragraph as a stream of consciousness because I believe that is how your mind works when you are on cocaine and you don’t stop to think about what your thought process is or if there is any punctuation needed because your brain is running a hundred miles an hour and there is no editing or deliberating or making things right you just run free and wild and head in any direction that you want and I wanted to mimic that so wrote it freeform and then changed a few words in the edit but mostly did it in that one take and one time.
I like what you did there! I’d also like to talk about the ending – no spoilers, but I just finished the book and with it fresh in my mind, there is plenty of scope to continue the story, don’t you think?
Yes! And I do know what happens next in her story! Unfortunately though, because of my TV deal contract and the possibility of a sequel I am forbidden on pain of death and/or a huge lawsuit from talking about it.
What is next for you? Will your next book be completely different?
Well, there’s more than one character in it for a start! I don’t want to say too much because I am still drafting, so the story is still in flux, but I can say that my next novel is set in the future again, involves quantum computing and is a love story.
Last One At The Party is out now, priced £12.99. Info: here
words CARL MARSH