(courtesy Hachette Australia)
If you were a cinemagoer in the ’80s and ’90s, when big budget action blockbusters were at their inarguable height, you would well acquainted with what it’s like for innocent people to get caught up in a situation far bigger than themselves.
These are usually not the sort of people who are plunged into high stakes, consequence laden moments and their reactions to being placed in an extraordinary situations plays just as great a role in how the story plays out, and its emotional impact, as the actions of those far better versed in these types of scenarios.
Jane and Dan are very much a member of this cohort of people who live somewhat meaningful but small “l” lives; Jane is a housewife and “failed” author (her first book sold under 500 copies) who frets about the couple’s two teenage children, Sissy and Josh while Dan is a man working at an unspectacular career who may or may not be having an affair.
Jane has become convinced he is, based on what she believes to be fairly incontrovertible evidence on his mobile phone, and as Jane and Dan at the End of the World – the title is a play on the restaurant, La Fin du Monde, at the centre of the book – begins, she is planning to use their nineteenth wedding anniversary dinner to ask Dan for a divorce.
Not quite what the anniversary doctor ordered but that’s life and it’s where Jane is and Dan, god bless him, is absolutely oblivious to the fact.
A second white van, driven by the seventh member, turns onto the road behind them, following at a close distance, its only job to turn perpindicular to the road halfway up, creating an effective blockade of sorts, so no other cars can even come in.
Or get out.
But while Jane does indeed ask for a divorce and Dan is duly blindsided and upset, there really is no time for the conversation to go where it almost inevitably will.
Because just as their conversation about the end of their marriage is gathering steam, climate change activists burst into the obscenely expensive restaurant, bristling with guns and a weird mix of Die Hard bravado and naively high-faluting ideals, and Jane and Dan and all the other diners and the restaurant’s staff becoming fairly predictable hostages in a reasonably conventional high stakes situation.
Only there’s one big kicker in the whole thing.
Everything the activists aka terrorists are doing is straight out of the plot of Jane’s book, and while the general public didn’t think much of it, one of the people holding everyone hostage clearly did.
While Jane spots the similarities straight away, it takes Dan a while to catch up, but when he does, and when the couple discover something gobsmackingly shocking about the hostage takers, Jane and Dan at the End of the World takes a whole other vibe as the sort of estranged couple are forced to not only deal with the situation at hand but also with a whole lot of home issues that are suddenly in play at quite possibly the worst time for them to do so.
It’s a LOT, and oh boy, doesn’t Oakley have fun with the effect this extraordinary turn of events has on some very ordinary dynamics in Jane and Dan’s marriage and the family as a whole.
If you think that dealing with the state of their marriage or their success as parents in the middle of a tense hostage situation is less than optimal, you’d be right, but half the fun of Jane and Dan at the End of the World, which is inventive and clever and full of all kinds of plot-driving fallible humanity, is how it bakes some fairly importnat but mundane concerns into a larger-than-life moment.
It’s darkly comedic as it addresses how you can’t just turn off life when it suits you, and also that much of what drives us to act and to make certain decisions, such as asking your husband for a divorce, may not be driven by the right information or evidence-based assumptions.
Going left when you think it’ll go right, and dashing and diving with amusing if intense alacrity, Jane and Dan at the End of the World is a compelling read, full of blockbuster-level epic action but grounded the kind of fallible humanity that would have to be evident in these types of situations but which would never make it into a Hollywood action movie because it would take away, so the creators think, from the film’s impact.
But the thing is, it’s the brutally realistic and emotionally honest humanity that gives Jane and Dan at the End of the World so much of its narrative oomph and which elevates above many of the straight action-oriented novels filling the shelves of bookshops the world over.
Jane frowns, confused, and then [redacted] jumps out of the window, straightens [redacted] backpack, and is gone, leaving Jane and Dan, the sole two people left standing in La Fin du Monde, minutes before it explodes.
You are sent hurtling along ona huge thrill ride bu Oakley who keeps the tension just so, but you’re also treated to people, well people, saying and doing the kinds of things that real human being in such a situation would do.
You wouldn’t speak like a John McClane-esque hero, and you wouldn’t maintain a stoice bravery in the face of terrible actions taken against you, and Jane and Dan at the End of the World gets that, serving up a storyline that feels grounded and real all t he way through.
Far from leaching away the impact of the more actiony moments, as noted, this bundling in of many very funny and darkly full-on grounded elements elevates the one thing we care about in stories like this – how on earth are the people caught up in it going to react and what bearing will their ill-informed or simply groundedly human attitudes and acts have on proceedings?
An absolute riot of a read that YOU SIMPLY CANNOT PUT DOWN – it’s like Oakley has slapped narrative super glue on your hands, and no, you do not want a soluble solution to wash it away – Jane and Dan at the End of the World is a gripping journey full of tension and dark humour, of assumptions shattered and truths learned, taking you to a buoyantly immersive place where you realise anew or for the first time, that even in the most extraordinary of situations that the most simple truths and realisations and the most ordinary of things can be assessed and resolved changing life, in the process, as you know it.