<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/19/the-end-and-everything-before-it-by-finegan-kruckemeyer-review-a-dreamy-alternative-to-the-world-we-live-in>
"A locked chest sits at the end of a jetty in a small island town. The key to
open it lies on a nearby bench. The town’s citizens believe the chest to be
full of valuable coins. Should they open it? After deliberating, they come to
the conclusion that the treasure would do them more harm than good. And so the
chest remains untouched on the jetty until it is eventually pushed into the
water.
When the chest is hauled to the surface generations later, the townsfolk are
surprised and delighted to discover that the coins are gone and it now contains
only cutlery. The forks and spoons are hardly worthless – the chest has
enriched the founding story of the town and, anyway, these people already know
that the wealth of their community lies in the social bonds formed by sharing
food, warmth and shelter.
These coins are an important plot point in this beguiling debut. They are
buried, hidden, discovered and hidden again over several generations.
Ultimately their worth is determined by how they can serve the common good.
The End and Everything Before It presents an intergenerational saga, narrated
in the form of fables such as the above. A couple named Isaac and Betty are the
progenitors of the chest story – but so is the island, the sea and the trees in
the forest beside which they make their home. What they did with their lives,
says an elderly Betty to Isaac, was make patterns: “We live beside the sea and
we made a life that is like the sea. We breathed in, and we breathed out. A
million times. Others breathed with us. We all breathed together.”
The End and Everything Before It is filled with episodes that look very much
like endings but turn out to be beginnings. Death, trauma, abandonment and war
yield new communities, new families. The book is organised into five sections,
the titles of which point to the cycles of repetition and renewal that provide
the novel’s thematic heart and its structure: Ebbing, Flowing, Tilling, Sowing,
Reaping. As Nella, Betty and Isaac’s granddaughter, reflects later in the
novel, “Life is repetitions – we cannot expect the patterns of our yesterdays
to unravel overnight and be knit anew.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
