(courtesy Text Publishing)
We are defined and connected by stories.
That may seem self-evident but it’s not until you drawn into a poetically rich novel like The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer that you come to understand, even just a little, how what we are told and how what we tell to others can so definitely shaped not just our life but those of everyone around us, and yes, even those far away.
In this luminously lovely work, where superlatively good writing with rich emotionality, vibrant storytelling and fulsome characterisation to devastatingly wondrous effect, we meet Emma, a young woman who lives with her father and brothers on the coast of a icy shore where they earn a living fishing.
When her mother disappears in the midst of Arctic icebergs, presumed dead, and the rest of her family finds death waiting for them far too early, Emma becomes convinced, thanks to a mention by her brother before he succumbed to a premature demise, that she has a death curse.
Anyone she meets and who stays in her orbit for any length of time will die, she believes, a corrosively macabre belief that sees her set out to sea, never to land onshore lest she curse those who live here with far too early an end.
It’s a desperately lonely existence but Emma can’t risk unleashing her blight in innocent souls and so she stays away from everyone and anyone … until one day when she comes across an island and sees a man and a young girl waving from the jetty and she stays and to her surprise, finds a home.
He points again, inviting again. And knowing one million per cent I will never head to shore until I am back at my home, until I am ready, I turn the sails and I head to shore.
It would delving too much into spoiler territory to say what befalls these two inviting souls or those who live in the town around the, but suffice to say, as The End and Everything Before It progresses, Emma comes to understand that perhaps what she has been told is not matched by the truth of the world around her.
Interestingly, Emma’s arrival in what becomes her new home is made all the richer by how much trouble Kruckemeyer has gone to to set up the stories of the people Emma meets and comes to regard as family and dear friends.
Through a series of seemingly unrelated character stories, we come to meet the man Emma meets and falls in love with, many of the people who lives before and after him, and even how the town comes into being in the first place.
It’s a fascinating interlocking and layering of stories which help you to appreciate how much stories matter, how they change and influence us and how their presence and absence shapes who we are and how we come to live our lives.
Because we have come to know these people so richly and well, Emma’s arrival feels the meeting of old friends and new family and while it’s a homecoming for Emma at a place she didn’t know she needed to call home, it also feels like a homecoming for readers too who feel like they know each person intimately by that stage.
(courtesy Text Publishing)
The charm of The End and Everything Before It is that it not only tells its interweaving stories supremely well but that it does in language that manages to be both richly poetic and emotionally accessible.
That’s not always a given with writers as talented as Kruckemeyer.
Sometimes the beauty of the language, generously gorgeous and arrestingly beautiful as it may be, can be so dominating that the emotional impact of the narrative is lost in the the desire to express it all so perfectly.
But Kruckemeyer holds beautiful language and heartrendingly communal humanity in perfect tension throughout, and what results is a novel that will cause you to stop and sigh at the beauty of it all while feeling deeply immersed and moved by the stories of people who don’t seem to be connected to each other until, of course, they are.
As they are knitted together, their stories told with beauty, quirk and a wry knowing, The End and Everything Before It comes charmingly and movingly alive, reminding us on every page that we are constantly locked in a battle between the stories we are told, and the truths we come to believe, and the world as it is which, interestingly, is shaped, in part, by these self-same stories.
Everything is connected and we come to know this intimately through the novel.
The road forks — two snow-white paths diverging. But I choose a third. A path remembered. A path I once made. I walk into the woods.
Being allowed to immerse ourselves deeply and thoughtfully in the lives of all these characters, and principally Emma, is such a gift.
How rare is it to be left alone with people, with the truth and freedom, the burden and the joy, of their stories and to realise that none of these stories exist in isolation.
Emma may have thought they did, as she tried to separate herself from the world and protect it from what she became to believe was her malignant badness, but the truth is, even she has to yield eventually to how interconnected everything are and that the idea of no man being an island and it taking a village is an inviolable truism of everyone’s lives.
Reading The End and Everything Before It it dawns in you how miraculous life is; what are the odds that we will meet certain people and even more richly, come to know them?
After all, there are multitudes upon this earth and finding people who will tell your story as you tells theirs is a rare and precious joy, and the odds of it happening seem vanishingly small.
And yet happen it does, and as The End and Everything Before It tells its own stories, we are able to lose ourselves in the truth and the beauty of them and come to understand how rich and important our stories are and that in lives full of humour and sadness, misery and liberative joy as this novel is, we are our stories and they are us and we should never let go of that truth and treasure it always.