Booker Prize candidate Endling is a discomfiting journey into a personal and national torment.
I wasn’t familiar with the word, but its meaning is immediately clear: an endling is the last of its species, extinction being inevitable and close.
Longlisted for this year’s Booker award, Endling immediately intrigues, introducing its protagonist, Yeva, a Ukrainian malacologist — a biologist specialising in molluscs — with a specific niche: saving snail subspecies in her country from getting to endling stage. She travels Ukraine in her mobile camper van-laboratory, hunting for near-to-last individual snails, rescuing and keeping them in hibernation state until she can somehow, hope against hope, find some of them a mate.
One creature in particular is her obsession, a lopsided specimen in a wrong-whorled shell she names Lefty. When he finally showed signs of life after his rescue, Yeva recalls that “his pair of eye stalks had stretched towards her like two pleading hands”. We smile at the pathetic anthropomorphism — but, reading the line again, it’s also a beautiful, moving simile foreshadowing what is about to happen to her country. Plot-wise, Lefty is what will drive Yeva through the impending danger and destruction: his deformity dooms him unless she can miraculously find another individual with the same defect in reverse.
Yeva, too, is achingly lonely. But she has asocial traits, bordering on misanthropy, so it’s ironic that, to fund her mission, she joins a marriage agency business, Romeo Meets Yulia. Earning appearance money as a candidate bride, she parades for and mingles with groups of Western bachelors on “romance tours” — an industry as real as the fate of endlings, and laden with the same flickering sadness.
She’s approached by a relative newcomer to the agency. Eighteen-year-old Anastasia is a not-so-wannabe-bride on her own, different mission: to find her mother, a single-minded gender activist who has abandoned her and her sister. Anastasia has devised a scheme to kidnap some of the bachelors as a high-profile international media stunt to spark their mother’s admiration and draw her back to them. She needs Yeva’s mobile lab to entice the men on a supposed romantic mini getaway to Kyiv’s surrounding countryside. Subconsciously empathising, Anastasia’s desperate hope mirroring her own, Yeva eventually agrees to help.
We sense this weird yet fairly benign, brief abduction will not end well, but, eccentric characters and offbeat plot foundation apart, the first 100 pages unfold in relatively straightforward form.
We sense this weird yet fairly benign, brief abduction will not end well, but, eccentric characters and offbeat plot foundation apart, the first 100 pages unfold in relatively straightforward form.
Then we’re forced into the first of several double-takes, as if everything that came before was a trick of the light. Abruptly, the novel apparently ends, because — switching into first-person narration — the author, Reva, a Ukraine-born Canadian, is too upset by the shock of Russia’s invasion. Dismayed about the fate of her homeland, distraught about her grandfather in Kherson, with its obscure snail symbolisation and petty romance tour premise she can no longer see any relevance in her book.
Contextually, Ukraine has a strong literary tradition, and the war has prompted a publishing surge, a cultural outpouring to counter Russia’s physical suppression and its threat to a people’s identity. So we know Reva will continue; besides, as part 1 ends, there are still 230 pages ahead.
Shifting gear and focus again, the story picks up from multiple perspectives. Yeva understands her responsibility to lead, the sisters being too youthful and fragile. Realising the need to flee the vicinity of Kyiv, she heads first on back roads west to get the men to safety, then does an about-turn, driving southeast towards Kherson, where there is even more danger. This is beyond counterintuitive, but she has her reason — a fluke online image of a tree on which — can it be? — rests a possible mate for Lefty. Through the looking glass mirror, into reality, the author reveals a human motivation: Reva’s grandfather must be persuaded to leave the doomed city.
Then there is the perspective of one of the bachelors, Pasha, also a naturalised Canadian, who has returned, starry-eyed, to the country of his birth, intending to find his bride and stay. Locked with 12 other men in the lab, mobile phones confiscated as part of the game of romantic high jinks, he is as confused about his own identity as he is about the fury of Russia’s bombs and missiles.
Other, peripheral characters portray degrees of apathy or ignorance about the invasion and war. Yeva’s sole friend, a long-distance, online biologist associate who similarly tracks endlings in Hawaii, urges her to empathise with Putin’s position, to accept Russia’s occupation, and leave Ukraine. She thought him a kindred spirit; immediately, she cuts the phone call and further contact.
In first-person narrator mode, Reva’s Canadian magazine editor rejects her article on how Ukrainians are using humour to cope. “We were hoping for your perspective as a Ukrainian expatriate watching the horror unfold from abroad (gentle emphasis on horror),” he wheedles. (Horror does manifest, much later in the novel, written in the style of a nonsensical moment, like a schlock-horror movie insert.)
Reva forgoes his invitation to rework the piece, but she is torn on how to write anything at all about what is unfolding, her inner dialogue captured in an absurdist, dream-state conversation between an as-yet-unpublished author and a group of yurt makers. “Who could have known that your best publicist would be Mr Putin himself,” they tell her, noting blithely that “Russia bombed Kyiv again today … fourteen dead, ninety-seven wounded”.
All the while, her book publisher is unsympathetic to her emotions and dilemmas, insisting she has “enough material” to complete the novel.
With its experimental, innovative concept and enthralling plot lines, Endling is satirical and witty, simultaneously playful and shocking, introspective and a shout from the rooftops. A few lines from the author’s inner voice underscores that we may be on the cusp of a wider, World War 3 conflict: “I’m trying to be grateful,” says the unpublished author. “But why must a country be bombed before we care about it?” To which the yurtmakers reply, “The world is a whore.”
Reva is asking us to think about a big question: where do we stand on the life-and-death struggle of a nation?
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