Genre can be a tricky thing. Some people embrace it, others feel shackled by it. And still others don’t give a crap.
And then you have someone like author West Ambrose, who, in the following email interview about his new novel The Last Boy On Earth (paperback, Kindle), seemed to work through it before ultimately saying, “Let’s call it…without any limitations; Cosmic Love.”
To start, what is The Last Boy On Earth about, and when and where does it take place?
What happens when the trees are your teachers?
“The men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country,” argues Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus. I had been re-reading such a text about the four divine madnesses and how a man becomes a lover when he first looks at the face of a beautiful boy. But I stopped suddenly as I was reading aloud this long dialectic of eros and philosophy; what happens when the trees and oceans and birds are as much as your teachers as your lovers? Why should a man not freely do what will gratify the beloved? Is it enough that Phaedrus tempts him away only for a moment, or is it an incomplete dialogue? It troubled me, as I am always deeply invested in the ways in which first nations oral narratives and storytelling intersect with modes of 16th Century Elizabethan theatre — and the ways in which oral histories are not here to be “erased” but rather embraced through a rhythmic and musical understanding of the language and truly “can only be perceived by listening, not reading,” as Portelli says.
Beyond this the main narrative of the story is set leagues beyond binaries and borders. Hearts do not have borders when we are born, lands are not marked with borders, and oceans certainly do not adhere to our arbitrary and manmade whims of destruction and siloing.
Overall, it is a pretty simple story: boy meets boy, falls in love with another man who is in love with another man who is in love with the memory of a boy (and the memory of that boy loves a boy who does not remember that boy and also a man and a boy right in front of him, and…)
You see? It is a straightforward ordinary phenomenon of the heart.
Where did you get the idea for The Last Boy On Earth?
I am often in transit; blowing in one place tomorrow, out the next. In between theatre productions, rehearsal, and a near-monastic existence at school, I often find myself at my piano. I wanted to show my friend a song which reminded me of both Dvorak’s Rusalka and the short stories of Ray Bradbury. When I tried to show it to them, it was no longer online (copyright, ha!). It did not exist, except in my memory. For a terrifying minute, I was the sole keeper of that melody. If I did not play it to its fullest strength, I would misrepresent the beauty of its original composition.
And I thought, what if that memory was Love; what would the song sound like then?
So, should we read anything into you naming the two main characters Julian and Vern, which sounds a lot like Jules Verne? Y’know, the guy who wrote 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. A novel about an undersea ship.
Their names lie somewhere between epistrophe and mondegreen. Julian and Vern have names that must return to each other (and themselves) with no true patrilineal or matrilineal surnames (like Cesario and Sebastian of Twelfth Night). They must return to each other in cadence and spelling, as well as symbolism. Julian is my masculine sonic for a Juliet rose and Vern becomes the hard rhyme for a “thorn.” Inseparable, and who has not wanted the fragrant bloom as much as the pierce of blood?
So, two names make one person. Two pearls make one seashell, full and enclosed. Jules Verne is an incredible science-fiction author because of his whimsy and mercurial use of language. In 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Verne clues us in as readers immediately; he is homaging Homer’s Odyssey with the name of “Captain Nemo” harkening back to the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus. Yet, Nemo is also Latin for “no man.” What does it mean to be nobody and to be monstrous? What does it mean to be a creature of this planet and to be human at the same time? What if you cannot help but run towards what the world exiles? What does it mean to be buried and to be beloved?
This is my tiny, wondrous odyssey of Love.
The Last Boy On Earth sounds like a fantasy story, maybe even cosmic horror, but I’ve seen it referred to as speculative fiction. How do you describe The Last Boy On Earth, genre-wise, and why that way?
When Leonard Cohen sings “My lady can sleep upon a handkerchief / or if it be Fall upon a fallen leaf,” is it speculative? When Keats entreats us to his wicked and wild fairy world of “The Eve Of St. Agnes,” is it speculative? Are the many doors of “dream-portals” Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel through real, metaphorical, metaphysical, or science fictional? Does the mechanical and death-bringing capitalism machine of Moloch in Ginsberg’s Howl resonate in any way with Metropolis? Is it speculative and / or science-fictional when the narrator in Howl can float across the ravaged wasteland of capitalism and embrace another queer man who is locked up for being too attuned to the horrors of the world? Is The Last Man science-fiction because it is about a world ravaged by a pandemic or is it just a manifestation of Mary Shelley’s grief? Genre is watery…I prefer to swim. Labels are just labels, and constant rebranding is a lot of needless work for the sake of money that never winds up in artists’ hands. But Art is something that will always expand outwards, forever and ever and…
In Shakespeare’s time, a boy actor had to be everything; a boy was a speculative element of science fiction, and beyond. A boy played boy and girl and man and woman and monster and fates and…so, the universe became the boy. In a lot of The Last Boy On Earth I am thinking of how men may be bards, but they lose their way; and boys can enact their lost wishes by moving freely through the desires of their own.
I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of Melville during my recent studies. It is easy to get hung up on the fantasy of the whale in Moby-Dick, and the innate cosmic horror of the whale. One reading of this book from some test readers while doing productions is that it is a watery graveyard and all our characters are already dead; in death we would not complain about our ills, only receive pleasure finally — but I have focused on the love. Whether that is a slight of hand, a re-centering, or…something else entirely remains to be told. Twelfth Night features the island of Illyria where it seems all the tragedies of Cesario and Sebastian’s lives are…untouchable in this space, re-oriented towards bliss. The characters in The Last Man travel in a lotus-like sailing boat named The Clarel, that opens into a beautiful, flaming flower that travels underwater to the darkest and most unexplored parts of the ocean. Maybe there is something in the endless journey so long as we never idealize the destination, including hunting the hart / heart.
A travelogue. A dialectic of love. Cosmic…Love. Yes, like that one song by Florence And The Machine. Let’s call it that without any limitations; Cosmic Love.
The Last Boy On Earth is your first novel, but not the first thing you’ve written. Are there any authors, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Earth but not on anything else you’ve written?
I am inspired by how a book opens like a rose, how a rose unfolds like a recitative, and how memory can sometimes only be unfurled when it is sung. While working on a production of Twelfth Night during the pandemic, I was supposed to play both Cesario and Sebastian (I wrote about this first in Kelp Journal, whose oceanic theme I adore!) Our working goal was discussing queerness and disability to its fullest; to complicate the double weddings at the end and instead break free from any normative conventions that might constrain the play, while also acknowledging the rich and intense connection between the language of nature and natural phenomena. We returned to the silly little songs that were sung in less vital scenes, but we felt that music was actually the core of the story, and ran with that. I always write in between and around productions; prolifically and intensely alone, perhaps to combat the extroversion that stage demands from oneself as an artist. This materialized as a rainstorm in the desert of ill health and longing for a safer space in the world; one that I fully allow myself to embrace in my art without restraint. For if we never dare to imagine that space, we are already doomed.
I cannot say it hasn’t inspired anything else I have written, because it is Shakespeare, after all — but Shakespearean plays were a pivotal part of the book’s creation. I will also say the short fiction of Thomas M. Disch was a big influence here, but he is an influence for a lot of my prose.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Was The Last Boy On Earth influenced by any of those things?
I take inspiration from theatre and opera. During an intense rehearsal period and ongoing voice lessons for opera, I was watching every version of Rusalka I could get my ears on. I was also thinking deeply about Rufus Wainwright’s opera Hadrian. I was looking behind the binaries of any artform and trying to sing in any way I could. So The Last Boy On Earth is definitely a work attuned to theatre and opera. Art is a medium, and it is all about how we use it; for me, I always gravitate towards art that benefits from digitization the least — it is a preference and also a blessing in an over-teched world.
As for films and television, The Last Boy On Earth was definitely inspired by the original Star Trek; I do not watch a lot of television (or screen time activities unless they are a necessity, for that matter) for health-related reasons, but when I do just want to rest in that way I find I gravitate towards films that are meaningful to me or will have meaning. So, I was watching Billy Wilder’s Sabrina for the hundredth time, Fellini’s Satyricon, and Bruce LaBruce’s Saint-Narcisse.
While not inspired by, I love the work that is being done in indie games, like Harold Halibut by Slow Bros and the work of Chris Darril (I am still patiently waiting for Bye Sweet Carole by the way; I have it wishlisted!); the attention to story and detail is profound. It would be a delight to ever work on a project with either of these teams of extraordinary artists.
Finally, let’s flip things around and talk about this: Do you think The Last Boy On Earth could work as a movie, TV show, or game?
I would love to see The Last Boy On Earth adopted to any of these formats, though I admit I tend towards animation so I don’t have specific castings in mind…but I’m thinking on it!
