The Last Harbor [Paperback]

But then a big ship pulls up alongside his little sloop, after he refuses to shove off; his stubborness leads to trouble with the authorities--they can even freeze his credit line--but, on the up-side, his new neighbour is a mysterious and beautiful woman, and her big ship just might provide his sloop with the cover it needs to survive a predicted epic-proportioned hurricane. Or, his little boat might get crushed between the colossus's hull and the wharf.

So we've got a brooding mariner-type who's boat isn't going anywhere for various reasons, who goes for walks and has numerous brief encounters with many salty locals, plus one phantom-lady. Scenes, alas, don't seem to go anywhere; loads of great description are wasted on a shambling plot that's waiting for a hurricane and a plodding romance to spark, culminate, do something. True, Slocum confronts pieces of his past, including standing up for himself at a posh party of former business colleagues who are ashamed of how far down the ladder he chose to fall, but no matter how you slice it, not much happens in this book.

Well-written tedium--doesn't even manage to move quickly-but-sideways like a crab on the beach by the ocean, but instead is more like a snail, oozing forward towards a small puddle.

X-Corp, makers of graphic interactive 3-D "dreams", controls the New England Town. Slocum was a rising worker who lost interest in his work, which led to a divorce with his wife and unable to see his daughter. He moved onto his broken down sloop with his only companions being the Smuggler's Bible and a cat. The harbormaster orders Slocum to leave his current place were he docks his boat because Coggerhill Wharf is THE LAST HARBOR in the area where a big ship can dock. Slocum refuses because he doesn't believe a big ship will arrive after fifteen years or more without any docking but he can't leave anyway until the mechanic fixes his boat. To his amazement, the big ship arrives along with rumors that the Syndicate is its owner. Invited to enter the big ship, Slocum meets Melisande. Soon he believes that she is his last harbor to enable him to regain his real dreams, but first he must learn what holds her prisoner on the big ship.

A lot of The Last Harbor takes place in bars and brothels. The Last Harbor has "mature" themes and a general tone of depression that may not be for everybody. If you can put up with Carl Hiassen, you'll have no problem with this guy. This book had more setting and fewer plots than is normal for the story. I personally thought that, after all the buildup, the author was in too much of a hurry to get the story over with, and the ending was disappointing in terms of the ever-popular and quite important "what happened?" quotient. THE LAST HARBOR is a typical George Foy grim and dark look at a 1984 book of what today's future would be. It leaves little hope for a person to survive let alone thrive all alone. The grayness of what is to come simmered through Slocum and his interactions or lack of with other people. At the same time that readers begin to understand the scope of Slocum's feelings and the environment her resides in, the audience will ask where is the action as the plot slowly evolves. If grit, grime, and gray are what a reader wants in a science fiction tale, then they should stop THE LAST HARBOR.

The plot of the book is a science fiction story with a little romance mixed in. This book is mostly for adults and young adults. The main character is unraveling a conspiracy. The setting is on earth in the 22nd or 24th century. The story is mostly in 3rd person and has some scientific explanation. He is in his own place. The Last Harbor is very long on atmosphere, and very long on "writing." Here is a passage from the book:
Slocum looked at other things as he sat and sipped his coffee but always his eyes returned to the marina across the water. He thought, as he watched it, that the place looked the same as the first time he'd seen it. That lack of change always felt odd because much else had changed in his life and in relation to the Whaling City Marina and the credit entity that was its core. But there it lay, starfiltered by mist, the tangle of rigging and masts, docklines and pilings, and the warped facades of the condo development behind, with the fuzz of sickened saltmarsh extending from it on both sides like the claws of a yellow-green crab. Behind the marina rose a jagged hairline of third-growth pitch pine and then the tower of an old-fashioned town hall and rooftops of suburbs farther south. He remembered seeing it like this across the harbor when he used to drive into Town looking for god knew what.

I really wanted this book to redeem itself. Foy's use of language is beautiful. The images created by Foy's words are vivid and his metaphors are brilliant. As I neared the end of this story, however, it became clear that I would be disappointed. While the themes explored throughout the book are interesting and relevant and kept me reading, the plot is ultimately one of "male hero rescues female victim". Yuck. So over all I liked and hated it at the same time.

But Slocum is more self-aware than most of his colleagues, and he has slowly become disgusted with the way the Flash saps his ability to sense and feel apart from the cues of 3-D. In a spasmodic attempt to force a change, he quits his XCorp job and goes to work for the Independent Credit Entity, a ragtag alternative community founded on a philosophy of smallness, interdependence, individuality--the polar opposite of giant Orgs like XCorp, whose size has transformed them into what amounts to independent, self-interested life-forms. But things don't work out with ICE. Slocum's wife leaves him, taking his daughter. Now Slocum lives alone on a sloop whose engine suffers from chronic mechanical failure, berthed in a decaying harbor in a crumbling New England town. He spends his days puttering about his boat and dreaming of escape, a routine broken by futile attempts to see his daughter and by visits to the Sunset Tap, a bar where outsiders like himself gather.

The sloop and its berth are all Slocum has, so when representatives of the town Council tell him he must move to make room for a large ship that's coming into harbor, he refuses. He half-believes the ship doesn't exist; when he wakes one night to find it has already arrived--a vast luxury liner like something out of the past century--it seems more dream than real. It carries, apparently, only a single passenger, a mysterious dark-haired woman. As a hurricane moves inexorably up the coast, and the Council steps up its efforts to make him move, Slocum's growing fascination with the woman and the ship lead him toward a secret that may offer the escape he craves--but at a price that may be too high to pay.

"The Last Harbor" is set in the same near-future world as "The Shift", "Contraband", and "The Memory of Fire". Like the latter two novels, it's concerned with the nodes (alternative communities like the ICE) and their opposition to the Orgs; but its focus is more on those who've fallen out of (or have never chosen to be part of) either sort of community, and live between the cracks--from the regulars at the Sunset Tap to the whores and toughs who hang out at Madame Ling's fortunetelling parlor to the little group of hobos who ride America's vanishing rails. Foy's evocation of the precarious existence of these people, and of the small, defiant sense of community they evolve despite their alienation, is both lyrical and profoundly melancholy, and sharply contrasted to the anomic, overstimulated excesses of Slocum's former colleagues, when he returns briefly to that world.

Though "The Last Harbor" is shaped by its science fictional content--especially Slocum's Flash addiction, which is painstakingly examined--it reads for the most part like a mainstream literary novel, exploring the same territory of physical decline and moral defeat that has been dissected in detail by such non-genre writers as Robert Stone. The bulk of the novel involves Slocum's efforts to understand his failures and pierce his many self-deceptions, and work his way back to something like a responsible life. Much of the action is internal; the external encounters that trigger Slocum's ruminations and propel him, bit by bit, toward transformation aren't particularly suspenseful, despite their deep significance for Slocum, and their often explicit symbolism (such as the unending quest to fix the unfixable sloop). The drama lies in the process of transformation itself, and in the choice Slocum faces at the novel's conclusion--a choice that (depending on how you read it) is either the final step in his struggle to break free, or a catastrophic re-surrender to slavery.

Straight science fiction fans, or those who liked Foy's more conventionally cyberpunkish books, may find this rather dull--and they will certainly be frustrated by the ending, in which a Big Science Fiction Idea, which might have been the center of another book, is put forward and disposed of in a page or two. But for those who appreciate more literary work, "The Last Harbor" offers a feast of imagery and atmosphere, and a compelling portrait of a flawed man coming to grips with his own history.