The Booker Review

“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.