Australian playwright Finegan Kruckemeyer’s debut novel The End and Everything Before It is a swirling, interconnected tale about a place and the community that formed around that place. But it is much more than this. The deeper meanings and connections between characters only come clear slowly and are both enlightening and quietly devastating.
The first part of the book feels like a series of vignettes about disparate characters over time. There is Emma the Greek, who is definitely not Greek, who loses family members until she is convinced that somehow she is the cause of all of the tragedy and sails away from her life. There is Isaac, condemned to a prison on a hill and on release finds that he has inherited a piece of land at the base of that hill. There is Nella “the seer”, told that she can never have children but who sets out to do something about that. And there is Conor, raised in an orphanage that sits where an old prison used to be on a hill. Slowly their stories weave together through time creating a tapestry of love, connection and loss.
The stories weave in and out of each other, connecting across the generations in startling ways. They are like a series of nested fairy tales, each illuminating aspects of the others. And just when readers might think they know where the whole enterprise is going, having either accepted or tried to explain away some of the more fantastical elements, Kruckemeyer takes the narrative through a series of dizzying turns which both recontextualise and re-emphasise everything that has come before.
All of this is anchored by Kruckemeyer’s startling and poetic language. Just one example of this – an observation by Conor of the love between his friend Pat and Pat’s mother:
And I learnt in that moment that love is a document that has to be translated. It’s written in so many languages, and each version you come across you have to learn anew. The word for regret in one love sounds exactly the same as the word for pride in another. And learning one dialect is an education that takes as long as those two people have known each other.
There are threads in this book about grief and loss and longing, and there is a sadness underlying much of the narrative. But despite this, Kruckemeyer’s outlook, and that of most of his characters, is a positive one. They understand that life is for living and that people eventually pass, and what is important is the example that they set and the positive legacy that they leave. But also, they understand that grief is a process (represented by a grand metaphor of a train for the grieving) that you work through and move past.
Kruckemeyer comes to this novel with 105 (!) plays for children and adults to his name and (according to his website) 42 awards since 2002. So while this novel is a new story telling medium for Kruckemeyer, he certainly knows how to write. And this novel, The End and Everything Before It, shows his skills to great effect – lyrical, heartfelt, beguiling and more than a little bit magical.
Robert Goodman
For more of Robert’s reviews, visit his blog Pile By the Bed
Other reviews you might enjoy:
- Elektra (Jennifer Saint) – book review
- The Bezzle (Cory Doctorow) – book review
- Ariadne (Jennifer Saint) – book review
Robert Goodman is a book reviewer, former Ned Kelly Awards judge and institutionalised public servant based in Sydney. This and over 450 more book reviews can be found on his website Pile By the Bed.
