Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Hillary Kelly on M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, Merve Emre on Tom Overton’s John Berger, Ed Park on Cleo Birdwell’s Amazons, Ryan Ruby on Emily Ogden’s Darkness Becomes Bright, and Josef Burton on Akbar Shahid Ahmed’s Crossing the Red Line. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
It’s set about 20 or 30 years in the future, mostly in the small coastal towns of Kent, where strange entities (they might be aliens, or bio-machines, or really anything) wash up onshore. The ‘artefacts,’ as they are called, arrived around the same time as the iGhetti; together they somehow upended life as everyone knew it, rendering Britain unrecognizable within a decade. As one man, Phillip Tennent, moves through this uncanny new world order, all of the tropes of postapocalyptic fiction fall away in favor of a far more timely and provocative proposal: The apocalypse might not be an end at all, but simply a long chain of baffling, disorienting incidents.
Writers have been thinking about different versions of doomsday for thousands of years—the tale of Noah’s ark is just one example of an ancient religious story about the eradication of humanity. But the fear that seems to plague modern minds is that it might all end with a whimper, rather than a bang. Through rants about late-stage capitalism, that infamous dog-in-a-fire meme, and other expressions of alarm, it’s become more and more common to hear people worrying—or joking—that the world is enduring a rolling apocalypse, a series of catastrophes so slow-moving that they won’t prevent you from browsing a J.Crew sale while everything falls apart.
He seems to be asking how humans will respond when they discover, en masse, that they are no longer in control of the planet’s destiny. Really, The End of Everything is a novel about surrender. That is to say, we got used to it.
No one had expected the utter banality of that.’ Harrison’s sociological portrait is attuned to the common idea that disaster can quickly become boring—or all too quickly assimilated and ignored. Horrible images of global catastrophe—razed cities, drowned villages—now flit through our phones in between makeup tutorials and political punditry. Pondering barbarity or devastation is as easy as pondering a lunch menu.
So what might people do if the tide turns against the whole of humanity, if the End Times finally come? In Harrison’s estimation, they’ll shrug. As bleak as this interpretation may sound, the novel is expansive rather than dismissive.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
