Page 45 Review by Stephen
Gripping premise in which everyone on the planet in possession of a Y chromosome haemorrhaged in an instant. Now every male on the planet is dead except escape artist Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. What happened and why?
I love a premise you can précis so succinctly. For something more elaborate please see our review of Y- THE LAST MAN BOOK 1.
The writer of SAGA, PRIVATE EYE, PRIDE OF BAGHDAD and EX MACHINA now takes us on a journey to Japan for further clues in a storyline that focuses on Dr. Allison Mann, her new girlfriend, her old family, the assassin and Israeli commander that have been tracking them. Does the catastrophe have anything to do with Dr. Mann's attempt at cloning herself, or am I sending you up the right alley but to the wrong address? Knock a little harder and someone may answer - just not who you'll be expecting.
Before we get there, every member of cast is now withholding secrets from each other. You'd think by now that they'd have all come out, but no, here are some more, and the sheer weight of dramatic irony threatens to thrust the story pell-mell over the side of a cliff. Fortunately it makes for one of the most sizzling episodes in the series so far, including the flashbacks wherein, for example, we learn that Ampersand - Yorick's pet monkey who may provide the key to saving Earth's human population - has done a lot more travelling than we thought. Recently he's been abducted, but now we learn where he originally came from and why he might be that key. Yes, yes, we already discovered the how, but this is the why.
This one dashes all over the place from Japan to Australia - where Yorick's searching for his girlfriend - back to America where another girl is now eight months pregnant with Yorick's child and suspects it's a boy. Why is that so important? Yorick is the last man on Earth. His very existence is known to few, until he's forced at gunpoint to drops his drawers for an international photo-journalist. With so many vicious factions at play in this all-female world, that single photo could see him dying of exposure, let alone start an international war, but what's Yorick really worried about?
"I... I didn't even have time to chump up. I was like, preternaturally flaccid."
I grew increasingly fond of Brian's dialogue here (it's a much earlier work that those referred to above), even if it is ridiculously well-informed. Conversations back at my house used to go something like this:
"Ah, these stuffed mushrooms smell great, don't they?"
"Miaow"
But in Y - THE LAST MAN you'd have been treated to a discourse on the psychotropic properties of fungi, along with an annotated history of their social consumption. For example, this time out we learn that the weapon of choice of the Vatican's Swiss Army is a Halberd (and that it was a Renaissance weapon and that it held off the Nazis in 1943); that men's buttons are sewn onto a specific side of a coat so that they could draw swords without them getting snagged; that women's are on the other side so that their ladies in waiting could fasten them from the front; and that "the average human bite strength is two hundred pounds, but some women can crunch up to a grand". All that, in casual conversation. Well, maybe some of those were the characters' specialist subjects and they wouldn't do so well on the general knowledge round, but crikey, Vaughan's a real swot, isn't he?
