The Booker Review

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  • Booker 2026 #4: The End of Everything (M. John Harrison)

    Since I started my annual read-of-all-the-Booker-prize-books project, I find that there are books that I really enjoy, and then there are books that I really have a lot to say about. This was one of the latter.

    The End of Everything is set in a near-future apocalypse in the South of England where something very vague and extra-terrestrial has happened. Phillip Tenant finds one of the aliens (which he calls an “artefact”) while beachcombing and brings it to his aunt Marnie’s home. Whereupon they just sort of…… spend most of the book driving up and down the coast with it while everything is weird.

    And that’s kind of it, that’s the situation as I understood it: Everything Is Weird. Gradually we come to understand glimpses, though never really the whole picture. That they’re at war, but it’s not really clear how, or where the enemy physically is; that these aliens – the iGhetti – do something strange to the space-time continuum leading to “bad patches” on the ground where time and reality are warped. People do strange impulsive things and nothing makes sense. It all makes for a very uncomfortable reading experience, like trying to decipher something blurry, or like looking at a mosaic from far too close – the story’s only there if you don’t look directly at it.

    “This is like reading poetry in the dark,” I wrote.

    But I found it quite fascinating for how clearly intentional the whole thing is. The characters find themselves drifting around in a new absurdity I found sickeningly reminiscent of the latter part of 2020. A few things felt familiar from this time, in fact. The passing of the initial crisis and the slow madness of watching everyone pretend things are normal, the way no-one appears to be in charge (Who’s driving this ship?). The urge to diarise everything.

    And then maybe most relatably, the disbelief at others’ reactions (at how can you be watching this and not screaming?) followed shortly thereafter by a quiet sloughing off of any residual sentiment of “all in this together”.

    There are a lot of things in this book that I both enjoy and find difficult to pinpoint, the ideas and realisations drifting past like fog. But I enjoyed this too, the sense of experiencing exactly what the characters must be experiencing. No one has any clue how to respond to a big change. One tries to run away on a boat to nowhere; another conducts sketchy science experiments in a greenhouse. Marnie trudges through chalk mud chasing a dog which may not exist.

    “After that, the apocalypse seemed to withhold itself, quickly becoming just another historical banality. That is to say, we got used to it. No one had expected the utter banality of that.”

    The use of structural markers in the book was particularly interesting for me and the way these add to the clues and glimpses. Two sections in particular – a series of notebook entries from Hampson the would-be scientist of aliens; a set of letters from Aunt Marnie to Phillip – drive the story along by explaining some of the background, but cleverly, in a way that the picture is still obscured. Even the existence of chapter titles added to this feeling for me because… why are they even there? I feel I’m being told exactly what’s going on and yet I constantly feel completely in the dark.

    Some of the glancing images in the story reminded me of other apocalyptic-flavoured content I’ve enjoyed. A scene with men wading out into the water en masse was reminiscent of the end-game part of Laura Jean McKay’s novel The Animals In That Country, about a strange pandemic that causes humans to be able to communicate with animals. A depiction of children making snowmen in a flurry of ash brings to mind a similar scene in the 2019 TV series Chernobyl. Both suitably creepy and effective that they definitely feel that they fit here in the inexplicableness of everything.

    By the final page I’m not sure what to take from this experience, if anything. There is a lot to enjoy here, including how it doesn’t tie up neatly. A crisis can arrive slowly and become permanent quickly and everything is messy and there’s no well-ordered final summing up of the journey. “We are so adrift,” I wrote. I sort of hope it wins.

    “Dense, stacked, towering, undecodable, these Fata Morgana had at one and the same time the qualities of being thoroughly suspect and obviously real.”

    This whole book is a Fata Morgana.

  • Booker 2026 #3: The Shadow of the Object (Chloe Aridjis)

    An Alsatian perceives a disembodied hand and bites it.

    Whilst staying in the hospital, Flora – a metallurgist visiting family in Mexico – befriends older German woman Wilhelmina, a collector of zoetropes and magic lanterns.

    Thus begins the story of The Shadow of the Object, a strange book made up of short non-chapters (no chapters titles, only gaps in the writing).

    Wilhelmina regales her life stories but doesn’t seem very interested in Flora’s. Later on, back in London, Wilhelmina’s son Max picks up these stories – and the friendship with Flora – although they don’t seem to like each other very much. These scenes bring to mind for me an episode of the TV cult classic Firefly called “Objects in Space”: People merely glancing off each other, not really connecting, have somehow become family.

    There is also, of course, something very Platonic about it all, casting shadows on the cave wall, never knowing the real object. Flora wonders if her friendship with the German patient was more based on Wilhelmina’s stories. Do we know our friends, or only the reflection of them on the world? Do they know us?

    Interesting that this has proved a difficult book to review. I made very few reading notes, and find that I don’t have much to say about anyone. I wonder if this is because of the nature of the story as its own magic lantern show, tableau after tableau, the characters not really interacting with each other even while sitting in the same rooms. All of this is clearly deliberate – I don’t dislike it, I’m just – not gripped by it, I guess? Although I am still mulling it over after reading. A slow-burning lantern.

    The magic lantern casts shadows, Wilhelmina casts shadows.

    A hundred pages in, I wrote: “I am still looking for the story. So maybe the story isn’t casting a shadow?”

    At the end of the day, this book is less a “story” and more its own slideshow, like the shows Wilhelmina, Max and Flora put on. A series of images. During a storm – its own kind of light show – a thunderclap delivers Flora a spider (SCENE); then the outline of a man (SCENE).

    And at the end of it all, a blank slide.

  • Booker 2026 #2: Helen of Nowhere (Makenna Goodman)

    “She believed she was no worse and no better than most people and that we’re all equally exceptional and equally doomed.”

    When my husband saw me reading this book the other day, he said: I like books with that sort of cover – they seem classy. Which is interesting because the very first thing I put in my notes for this one was how much I usually dislike books with this sort of binding – small, plain and navy blue – “too LITERARY,” I wrote.

    This book certainly is literary, but I’m not sure I could say I disliked it. Although I’m not fully sure I could say what it’s about, either. The story follows a tiny cast of mostly-nameless characters (Man, Realtor, Wife) – only the eponymous Helen having a name, although possibly not a body? We seem oddly unsure about this – for a moment in time. The format resembles a stage play made up of a series of monologues, although I suppose not true monologues, as Man keeps interrupting them. We gather that Man is viewing a property following the breakup of his marriage, a property formerly owned by the mystical Helen.

    Other than that, I find it difficult to tell you anything with certainty about the story. I feel as if I have been sucked into the dreamlike quality of the story where everything may or may not be how it seems and there’s something very Christmas Carol-esque about it all.

    Man receives life advice from Realtor, whose thoughts seem to swirl back on themselves in a villanelle-like poetry. The narrative then descends into something like a séance, as Man contemplates his life choices with guidance from Helen, who may or may not be in an assisted living home. And then, at the final Act – and the whole thing is so dreamy I almost missed it – he… turns into a dog?

    As the risk of sounding (even more) pretentious: The absurdly wide margins in this book remind me of an exhibition that I saw at the Ashmolean museum years ago on the use of qi 气 in Chinese traditional painting. Sometimes translated as like a “spirit” or “energy”, the main idea was that these paintings use a lot of blank space around the edges to let the subject breathe, which can give an illusion of power and movement, letting the qi life force flow.

    In this book, Helen is the qi moving around the painting, filling in the gaps of everyone else’s consciousness.

    “Isn’t it a joke,” says the Realtor, “how you can tell a story and other people hear a different story than the one you told?”

    I was recently told that it is not always clear in my reviews whether I liked the book or not. I tend to think it is rather clear when I didn’t like a book; but I also think that part of the job of the reviewer is to sit with the complexities of a story and of one’s reactions to it, without trying to over-simplify them into easy categories. I found this book interesting, puzzling; I found Man tedious and disagreeable, I found Realtor’s racing thoughts intriguing; I am mystified beyond explanation to have reached the end of the book and be unable to say for sure whether the main character turned into a dog or not. But did I “like” it? So, if you could please read the book and tell me, that would be great, thanks 😊

  • Booker 2026 #1: Black Bag (Luke Kennard)

    In some ways, Black Bag feels like a book of one-liners, as if I’m watching stand-up comedy. I don’t hate it. “I have measured out my life in coffees I can’t afford,” says our narrator on page 2. “Preach, brother” I wrote in my reading notes.

    The story follows a mostly-out-of-work actor (unnamed) as he takes on a contract to wear a body-enveloping black leather bag at the back of a psychology lecture for a term, ostensibly to see how the students will react over time. A predictably unpredicted series of events follows which quickly reminds me of the 80s cult film Withnail And I (also, incidentally, about unemployed actors). A touch of the absurdism, of Waiting For Godot futility. The image that remains with me is a man in a bag pedalling one of those swan pedalos you find in a lake in a public park, for no discernible reason.

    There are interesting subtones (or possibly supertones) about what counts for ‘work’, here at the pointy end of the Cenozoic era. Black Bag’s friend Claudio makes a living primarily from streaming video games on Twitch. Enamoured with the narrator’s performance art, Claudio hatches various supplementary schemes to make money from the Black Bag franchise by means of NFT drawings scribbled in pen on the train and a newly invented crypto currency. It’s all quite ridiculous and thoroughly believable.

    Late in the story we take a short detour to the cinema, where the narrator and his sort-of-girlfriend Justine go on a date to watch the first completely AI-generated film. “Nobody knows if there was human input at any stage,” gushes Justine excitedly. A popular view, though one that greatly irritates me given that “AI generated” can currently be taken to mean “an average of all human input generated so far.” In the same way that if you ordered “the average of all drinks” you might get beer mixed with cran-apple mixed with fermented mare’s milk, watered down with a slice of lime: It’s icky.

    As humans we spend so much of our energy on jobs which seem ‘important’ but are basically, at the cosmic level, pointless. And increasingly we find that even there the AI-generated version is ‘good enough’.

    The narrative style of Black Bag is an unusual one. A lack of speech marks gives conversations a sort of dream-like feeling, but more than that, the tone is a very self-aware mocking of the modern world. The narrator constantly breaks the fourth wall by talking directly to the reader about his narration. He shares his rich inner world, replete with entire imaginary conversations with the family dog, and engages in a complex maladaptive daydreaming scenario involving life in a Swedish village. I find this disturbingly relatable, the way his mind flits around all over the place.

    At its heart, this is a book about loss of identity (particularly the loss of male identity – the end stages of the book feel increasingly Fight Club – but it’s all relatable). About the important questions of the day like, Who are we? And what is the point in all this?

    On a bad day I can drown in such questions. On a better day, I feel like we should all take a swan pedalo for a jaunt downstream, dressed as a bag, to who knows where. Because we can.

    ***

    This is the first of my Booker 2026 reviews. Like last year, I aim to examine each of the 13 books on the longlist, which I will read in a randomised order and without learning anything about them in advance. Unlike last year, I won’t be attempting to speed through at one per week, but will persevere to the end at a slightly slower pace. Stay tuned! 😊

  • Warm-Up for Booker 2026 : Staying On (Paul Scott, Booker winner 1977), and, River East River West (Aube Rey Lescure, Women’s Prize Shortlisted 2024)

    I can’t pretend: I didn’t choose these two books for any particular reason other than I was lent them both at the same time. But a comparison of them struck me as inescapable, so here we are.

    Both are stories of “staying on”, in a sense.

    Staying On, both set in and written in the 1970s, tells the story of a British couple living in a run-down hotel in post-colonial India – the last of their social group to have stayed behind after independence in 1947. We watch Tusker, a retired army colonel, struggle to fit in to a society which has clearly left his type of people behind, while his wife Lucy pines nostalgically for a Britain (or “Yookay,” as their servant calls it) that she hasn’t seen for forty years. The tone resembles a black comedy and there is an element of the Fawlty Towers-esque about their situation, the absolute peak importance of who will mow the lawn.

    River East River West, meanwhile, begins in 2007 Shanghai, where 15-year-old Alva longs for an America she has never seen. The mood here is perhaps more sombre as Alva’s American mother, a failed actress who also “stayed on” after moving to East Asia as a young adult, clearly struggles with alcohol, and a number of bad things happen to everyone in the story. Not least to Alva’s Chinese stepfather, Lu Fang, who was “sent down to the country” along with the other university students in the 1960s – an event which upturned his whole life and from which he has never really recovered.

    In some ways, both novels’ Western women protagonists – British Lucy; American Sloan – suffer a strange kind of oppression of privilege. Being white in largely non-white countries, they are treated as movie stars and millionaires, even as they scrabble in the dust for money and security. Though surrounded by company, they seem weighed down by a profound loneliness of never being considered “local”. For the younger Alva, the isolation is all the more piercing: Neither the Chinese kids with whom she shares her school days, nor the American expat community she inveigles her way into, want to claim her as her own. In both stories there is sometimes a feeling less of “staying on”, more of “been left behind”.

    We see the blows coming before they land. Reading River East River West, I find myself constantly muttering “oh no” and “oh dear” as the axe begins to swing, nothing too unexpected. And yet the blows still hurt. Even Staying On, which begins at the end – a death on the first page, Agatha Christie-style – was surprising in its emotional poignancy when the end finally arrives for real, bracing for the impact we know must happen because it has already happened.

    In the end, one story ends with a coming together; the other with a breaking apart.

    As a linguist, an interesting comparison which struck me about these two novels is the way in which the authors handle immersion in their characters’ worlds through incorporating the local language, and how the reader’s understanding of this can influence our own feelings of isolation or involvement in these worlds. For me, not knowing any Hindi, I could sometimes feel a little wrongfooted by the language of Staying On, with its sprinklings of memsahib, mali, malum… – as, presumably, the author intended. River East River West, on the other hand, makes the interesting choice of frequently including actual Chinese writing with no clue as to pronunciation. Which is 没问题 for me (see what I did there), but I imagine could be a jarring experience for non-speakers for Chinese, not knowing how to read aloud words in the middle of a sentence. Encountering this, I sometimes felt like I was in on an in-joke.

    In River East River West, too, the Chinese is truly part of the story, the repeated motif of 囚 qiu (“prisoner”, a word made up of a person 人 in a box 口) resurfacing again and again to illustrate how trapped Lu Fang has felt – how trapped they all are, really, in their own lives.

    “Could a person live out her life in a foreign country as performance art?” wonders Alva, as she worries that her not-quite-expat not-quite-local life has all been a fake.

     But then isn’t all of life anywhere a performance art?               

  • Week 14-and-then-some: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai)

    “‘It must be scary to be here on your own.’ ‘It’s scary to age alone.’ ‘It’s scary to be young alone.’ ‘We are all ultimately alone.’”

    When a book begins with a whole-ass family tree, you know it’s going to be something of an epic. And this epic took me so long to wade through that I’ve been listening to Christmas carols on Classic FM whilst reading it. I’m not sure if that added much to the atmospherics of an Indian summer or not, but I do think my main complaint here is the length, as it is my personal policy that no story should run over 600 pages unless it is literally Anna Karenina. (And I only ever managed to read the first 400 pages of Anna Karenina. 🤷‍♀️)

    Set at the turn of the millennium, the narrative follows… what, exactly? The story has the feeling of a slow-moving serial (not unlike Anna Karenina, in fact!) as the characters convene and diverge, taking us on a tour of India and the USA, Italy and Mexico.

    Sunny and Sonia, separately, are sent to study in America as young adults. Both are writers and both, we are told, are lonely. We hear much about their families at home in India – the feuds, the corruption scandals, the lives of servants. The delicious kebabs. Sonia becomes involved with an older artist in the US, who treats her poorly. Sunny accompanies a childhood friend (Satya) on a trip home to seek a wife, and attends their honeymoon as a sort of chaperone.

    It is sometimes difficult to specifically identify the thread holding such a meandering story together, or where we are going with it, but motifs appear and reappear in a somehow reassuring way. The ‘ghost hound’ chasing Sonia around the world, Sunny’s mother’s last exhortation to her husband. (“Ratty, don’t die. If you live, I will love you – after all!) The tricks we employ like a talisman against the inevitable.

    I found the character of Sonia probably the most interesting; and her eventual relationship with Bhatia (Sunny’s mother). Sharing a house in a place neither of them come from, plagued by bandicoots, through a completely inexplicable series of events, they finally find openness with each other. The things you can only say in the dark.

    The story of Sonia and Sunny meanders very gently: the dance of choosing a mate is interesting. “Why here exactly?” wonders Satya’s wife on the eve of their wedding, “Why am I married to this man exactly?” Everything is a series of chance encounters; but in another way, we have a sense that fate is at work. That it doesn’t matter if they sometimes feel lonely or lost, because everything that is going to happen will happen. A reassuring thought indeed.

  • Week 13-ish: Flashlight (Susan Choi)

    “Sometimes, the unjustly downtrodden took up arms and fierce miens, but equally often they turned the other cheek, studied harder, camouflaged themselves ever more behind obedience and merit and bided their time, believing against all evidence that the future would bring something better, for them if for nobody else. He tried to be the second kind of ruined person.”

    Flashlight begins and ends with Louisa, but is really the story of her father, Serk. It is a story about hope and loss; and, primarily, it is a story about identity.

    Serk is a man of many names. Born in Japan at the end of the Second World War, he goes by ‘Hiroshi’ at school and ‘Seok’ at home. He feels Japanese, but the Japanese don’t recognise him as such because his family are ethnic Koreans. Against his prophesying warnings, his parents and siblings heed the magnetic siren-call of the new DPRK, migrating to North Korea in hopes of a better life, while he instead leaves for college in the US and rebrands himself as ‘Serk’. Interestingly, this name change is never once mentioned, leaving the reader with a faintly unsettled undercurrent of feeling as we try to decode his true self. Who is this man really: teacher, father, spy?

    Years later, Serk returns to Japan on an academic posting with his American wife Anne and daughter Louisa. Anne and Serk each secretly meet family members in Japan, while Louisa slides effortlessly into Japanese school life. Anne is becoming more and more ill – nobody yet knows why. And then calamity really strikes as Louisa is found washed up on the shore, alone, after a night-time walk with her father along the beach.

    We hear the story out of order, following each of Louisa, Serk and Anne in turn, sometimes with cameo appearances from other characters, the narrative spanning decades and continents. The motif of the flashlight somehow ties the story together across this space and time, in a way that brings to mind the silver sword – another childhood favourite of mine – yet more complicated, too. Less a symbol of pure hope than of hope waning; of seeing things and not seeing them. So many secrets, so much unknown.

    I found Serk’s story utterly riveting, full of mysteries. Although I foresaw some of the reveals, I still found them delicious when they happened. Conversely, I found something slightly repellent in Anne’s story – perhaps just a little too close to home? – feeling anger rising as the doctors dismiss her very real symptoms, a case of documented medical misogyny in action.

    And Louisa I simply found highly relatable. A scene depicting a séance around a flashlight in a youth hostel feels so… autistic? Shut out of the social group for stating facts; ruminating over some imagined offence to people who have long since forgotten everything she said. She starts out as somewhat of an unreliable narrator, yet I found her very likeable, clearly processing her grief and trauma through maladaptive coping mechanisms.

    A theme of resilience draws the reader on at each turn: “Coming back to herself at such moments, she thinks, Life is over. But apparently not. There are more things to cherish and lose.”

    Side note: If you’re going to attempt 13 books in 3 months, don’t leave the longest ones till last 😉

    That said, I found Flashlight a powerful tale, and one that I didn’t like to rush.

  • Week 12: The Land in Winter (Andrew Miller)

    “The snow had changed things. They were in the world differently now, people understood that.”

    I have always found that there is a magical quality about snow: it creates a liminal space out of the ordinary where everything stops, and somehow, there, life happens. People come together or are pushed apart.

    Eric and Irene, Rita and Bill. Two couples living next door to each other in rural England, during the Big Freeze of 1963. How to describe them? Eric is the village doctor. His wife, Irene, is pregnant. Rita is also pregnant, and fascinating: a former club dancer who reads books on the farmhouse floor by the Aga, she hears voices, and is friends with the Black projectionist at a Bristol cinema. Her husband, Bill, tries to raise the money to be a commercial farmer (one of their cows is called Nefertiti), leading his single bull around the yard: “When they fell out of step he felt the sudden tug, as though he were holding a planet on a kite string.”

    The Land in Winter is a story about big things found in small things. Pregnant women drinking Guiness together (a different time!), a man having an affair, a doctor on house calls. Life and death, but in a tiny way. There is nothing extraordinary about these lives, but somehow the story feels extraordinary.

    As we follow these four protagonists in their turns, the narrative knits together and apart like train tracks, their stories sort of drifting along next to each other like snow flurries – sometimes meeting, sometimes parting. We follow these characters into the storm (Where is Bill going? Where is Irene going??), their progression gentle yet strangely intriguing.

    These people seem stuck in the war somehow. Eric’s partner at the doctor surgery tries to process his Holocaust scars while at a party; Bill’s father repurposes his Anderson shelter as a home-made sauna; everyone remembers the Blitz. There is, too, a certain sense of Black Comedy – like the Peter Shaffer play – to the proceedings at times: a wife meets a mistress in a bedroom without recognising her; a woman fumbling around a literal School for the Blind in the dark. And the whole middle section of the book dispenses with chapter numbers: like snow drifts, we too are lost in the storm, in the blackout.

    As Irene walks home from the village shop, she contemplates: “And then the child would grow old and die, and the child’s child, and so on until it all stopped, countless little lives, her own perfectly invisible among so many.” Yet she finds this thought comforting, and so do I.

    Looking up at the stars – a cosmic ant – knowing that the biggest things you’ll ever experience are still tiny.

  • Week 11: One Boat (Jonathan Buckley)

    “I asked her: ‘But why are they here?’ To which the answer was the Big Bang, which was not an answer, because the Question of Questions wasn’t ‘Why are there stars in the sky?’ but rather ‘Why is anything anywhere?’”

    One Boat is a book that deals with Big Questions. A bereaved woman retraces her footsteps through a Greek village from another visit some years earlier: contemplating consciousness, finding connection. The mood is melancholy and pensive, and a bit bleak. The characters she meets and re-meets are maybe part of each other’s greater story, maybe not.

    The overall atmosphere is very ‘meta’, in the sense that we are observing a woman observing her own mundane notes taken while observing others – not so much a story, even, as a vague waft of vignettes. She seems lost in introspection. Wrestling with questions to which there are no answers and in which most people aren’t that interested, she watches the people around her with intrigue and perhaps a little disdain, bathing in the silliness of village life and petty politics.

    Her philosophising, too, quickly rises to the level of absurdism. “Which is sillier, she asked: Thinking that fish have feelings, or thinking that allowing a female goat to graze on the holy mountain would take something away from the glory of the Virgin?”

    Well, quite.

    None of these thoughts are really novel, though – fun fact: Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi was already pontificating about whether fish in the Hao river could feel joy in the 4th century BCE – but maybe that’s sort of the point, that she’s so stuck in her head wrangling with these unanswerable questions that she’s missing the present entirely.

    There’s usually a single Booker choice each year that just makes me go, “…Huh?” This was that one. One Boat is one of those lofty works that makes me feel as if the narrative is taking place on some higher plane of existence, like a blend of spices too nuanced for my amateur palate. Often the critics rave about such books, while I feel stuck in some alternate dimension where the plot is craftily labelled ‘The Emperor’s New Storytelling’. Maybe that makes me uncultured, but at the end of the day I read for enjoyment, and I didn’t enjoy.

    One thing I did like, from this tiny textbook-esque almanack of living, was the narrator’s observations on the life of dogs: “Watching him lapping the water up, I uttered some banality about living in the moment – we observe life, I said, but animals live wholly within it.” Banalities are often mundane because they are true, and it reminded me of the aphorism about the past and future not really existing – that only the present is real. Our narrator, Teresa, demonstrates this rather finely by spending all of her time reminiscing about her past and contemplating what she ‘will’ write in the future. We would probably all do well to be reminded of this, from time to time.

  • Week 10: Endling (Maria Reva)

    “They needed each other to bear witness, because the rest of the world didn’t.”

    Thus begins the story of Yeva and her extremely endangered left-shelled snail companion, Lefty. (Did you know that snails have a ‘handedness’? Well, now you do.) Yeva travels round Ukraine in a mobile lab trailer, attempting to rescue and find mating partners for her ‘endlings’ – the last-of-a-species molluscs hibernating in her fridge. To fund this noble venture she participates in a marriage agency, paid to go on dates with wealthy foreigners. Although, as it turns out, Yeva is ace – asexual – and personally experiences no attraction, to anyone of any gender.

    There is a certain mindfulness to snail rescue, and a certain poetry to her iconoclastic life.

    Then – plot-twist! – Yeva agrees to lend the services of her mobile lab to a pair of sisters (Nastia and Sol) from the marriage agency, who plan to kidnap 12 bachelors to make a point about the evils of the mail-order bride industry. And here the war catches up with them.

    …Endling is really a very difficult book to describe. Not least because, just as the narrative temperature is rising deliciously to a crispy climax at the end of Part 1, the author interjects to completely break the fourth wall, writing as… herself? And the story becomes about something completely different – about three women fleeing from war, but also about an author abroad struggling to make sense of events as the news overtakes the creation of fiction.

    As if in a private soliloquy to the audience after the first act curtain of her story has come crashing down, Maria Reva speaks in different voices about the real worry of a grandfather refusing to leave his home in Kherson in the thick of the bombardment, the awkwardness of sipping oysters at a literary event while Kyiv burns, the role of humour in wartime –  Like, what are you meant to do when war breaks out in your face in the middle of your life, in the middle of your book? Reva is suddenly paddling like mad to keep up with reality, and she decides to bring us along for the swim.

    The second half of Endling brings three things to mind for me:

    The first is the start of Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, a poignant yet comic depiction of ordinary Parisians’ flight at the outbreak of war (which, I read in French, FLEX 💪). Something highly relatable, yet slightly grotesque, about being more interested in saving one’s picnic cheese than escaping a war. Like being more interested in saving a snail than avoiding an invading Russian army.

    The second is 2023 Booker winner Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, set in an Ireland in the near future which is slowly descending into authoritarian tyranny, and brimming with a sense of “this could happen to you.”

    And the third is an advert by ActionAid, made early on during the conflict in Syria, which charts a child’s journey from normal everyday life through fleeing her home and becoming a refugee. Only the child is clearly in the UK. The tagline at the end of the advert, in a silent gut-punch, reads: “Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”

    I remember being perplexed in 2022 that people in Europe who had blithely ignored the plight of refugees fleeing conflicts in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Syria, were suddenly tripping over themselves to welcome and support refugees from Ukraine. Was it because Ukraine was closer? Or was it that these people looked like ‘us’? I couldn’t really understand it.

    One of the interesting things in the grand theatre of war is that the small everyday things don’t go away, and in fact, if anything, perhaps they can become even bigger and more important. A bachelor still looking for a wife. A young woman still searching for her mother. And so I, too, found myself writing in my notebook: “I GET THAT THERE’S A REAL WAR ON BUT I AM SO INVESTED IN THIS SNAIL!!!”

    Maybe I will leave the final word to Pasha, one of the kidnapped bachelors, whose story we are to understand mirrors the author’s in some way: “It’s what you all do, in the free world. You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn.”

    What is one supposed to do at the onset of war? Why do we care about some people, in some places, and not others? What matters and what doesn’t? In life, as in fiction, there are no neat answers to these questions.