The End We Start From – Megan Hunter

“An unprecedented flood. London. Uninhabitable.”

Megan Hunter’s novel offers us a water-logged apocalyptic vision that is simultaneously unreal and frighteningly plausible – a climate-based disaster that echoes a real life awareness of our planet’s fragility. An unnamed mother is our hero in this tale, and we follow her journey as she attempts to carry her newborn son through a sinking London. Yet despite its serious subject matter, the book offers a serene vision of human existence within a collapsing world, maintaining a hopeful current that speaks of the human urge to survive, and a mother’s ability to persevere for her children.

As the nameless mother and her baby Zeb move from safe house to refugee camp to island home they gradually shed the luxuries taken for granted at each previous settlement, their supplies of food, nappies and blankets dwindling as social structure and control also melt away. As the existence described is stripped back to the necessities of survival, so the language is also trimmed to the bare minimum of description. The characters that populate the crumbling world of the book are identified only by their first initials, with the baby’s being the only name we learn. The narrative is conducted from a detached perspective of a new mother who herself seems to see the world with the clarity and novelty of a newborn, the story told in brief, languid snippets that allude to Hunter’s primary medium of poetry. The book’s very title is plucked from a poem, T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets, which reads: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from”, again alluding to human’s ability to continue in the face of disaster, and even finding the opportunity to build something better from the rubble. Like the narrator who appears and disappears behind a tea towel to entertain her son, it is a “revelation that something can come back, again. And again. And again.”

The narrative is interspersed with snippets of creation stories taken and adapted from both mythological and religious texts, and the book as a whole is quite a heavy nod to the theme of rebirth – traditionally achieved through the cleansing power of water. Of course, this is perfectly encapsulated in the figure of a mother whose own waters break as her portion of London begins to flood – her home situated in what is known as the ‘Gulp Zone’; “Finally I am waterless, the pool of myself spreading slowly past my toes”.

Mothers are, and will always be, powerful figures in literature. However in an end-of-days scenario, it becomes a slightly tainted role. Keeping one’s offspring alive in a doomed world is an act that is both heroic and tragic. In the mother’s profound awareness of the new life she has created, she is also hyper-conscious of the fragility of his existence; “I am constantly aware of the complex process of breath: how the heart has to keep beating...to power the bags of the lungs in and out...it seems that at any moment it could stop.” Through her eyes the very act of survival is a complicated and difficult process, with the reader made to marvel at how delicately life is sustained.

Yet this awareness also forces the protagonist to seek and follow humanity in the midst of disaster. While others choose individual survival, the narrator chooses community and love, forming alliances with people she meets along the way – including another new mother whose baby she breastfeeds alongside her own; “sometimes I sleep with both babies, a twin-mum, turning from one side to the other. Their sucks are almost identical.” The narrator “falls in love” with her fellow survivors, a tender and deep love that stretches beyond merely people and into the new existence she has found, detailing a great love of life that cannot be stifled by the world’s seeming desire to snuff humans out; “Between the waves of disembowelling wrench the world is shining. I feel like Aldous Huxley on mescaline. I am drenched in is-ness.”

It is hard not to feel appreciative of the world around us when reading Hunter’s words. The poetry of her language causes the reader to linger on the small details of the mother’s existence, from memories of her life before; “an iced margarita, its meeting with tongue, throat, chest”, to the island life of plenty she creates where Z “eat[s] butter in chunks”

In this way, Hunter’s end of days is a far from damning vision. It is a wonderful book in the midst of a seemingly dire situation. While it does not deny the environmental problems humans have created for themselves, it offers a path that accommodates human’s innate and irrepressible desire to survive, and to make of the world what they can.