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.
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