(courtesy Simon and Schuster Australia)
In the very depths of the COVID pandemic, when by rights I should have been wallowing in warm and fuzzy everything, I developed, along with a great many other people I believe, on obsession with apocalyptic tales.
If that seems like the most counter intuitive thing to do in the middle of a period when everything we know about the world and the way we lived in it, got temporarily suspended, then remember that there’s something about reading about people in far worse situations than you to make your current predicament not feel so bad after all.
Thing is, once the pandemic ran its course, I left all those end-of-the-world stories well behind but something compelled me to pick up Not With a Bang by Temi Oh (Do You Dream of Terra Two?), a novel that handles an extinction-level event impacting the Earth with rare humanity and incisive empathy, and I am heartily glad I journeyed back to my 2020-21 genre of choice, even if only for one book.
What really marks the novel something special in general but especially in the context of the genre it occupies is that allots a healthy slab of its always engaging narrative to setting things up, allowing us to get to know the family at the heart of the story who love each other but like all closeknit families, have forgotten how to like each other.
‘What haven’t we witnessed?’ Pastor Abiola asked. ‘Civil unrest, natural catastrophes, wildfires, pestilence and plagues. Which of these have we managed to endure by ourselves? If we are to survive this, we will only do it together.’
That’s important because when Not With a Bang kicks into high gear, knowing what we know about the family, and specifically one of the middle of four daughters, Briar, makes everything feel so much more immediate and intensely relatable.
We learn, for instance, that Marcus, Briar, Aaliyah, Tanice and Chantale’s father, is white – mother Kim is a public health officer and hails from Nigeria originally – and a doomsday prepper who is convinced the signs are there that the world, even if it doesn’t end (though it could), is about to hit the motherlode of all bumpy patches.
He digs out a bunker in the backyard, fills it with all kinds of food, water, medicine etc., and insists his family take part in endless drills designed to make sure that when the worlds ends/sort of ends/goes to sh*t that they will survive it all and be ready to emerge into whatever emerges afterwards.
No prizes for guessing that Marcus and Kim (who has major health worries of her own), who once loved each other ardently, unafraid of the obstacles always put in the way of a mixed-raced marriage and determined to make it work, aren’t seeing eye to eye about Marcus’s fanatical readying for any stripe of apocalypse, and while the four daughters go along with their dad’s preparations, none of them seriously believe the world is going to end soon, if at all.
Aaliyah is getting ready to marry kind, sweet rich boy Hugo, Tanice is in love with a young man who isn’t problematic in himself but rather in his unexpected relationship to a traumatic incident which ended Marcus’s policing career, Briar is getting swept into a UFO cult which looks harmless but good lord is NOT, and much younger Chantale simply wants to feel safe in her family.
Whatever anyone feels about the determination by Marcus to prep for the end of all things doesn’t really matter when an extinction-level event sees the world, and in the case of the family at the centre of Not With a Bang, London, ripped to shreds in ways that seems so fantastical that they can’t possibly be possible.
But possible it is, and as civilisation teeters on the brink – once again how easily and fast it collapses reinforces hoe paper thin is the veneer between things being okay and anarchically, destructively hellish – it becomes clear that if the family are to survive, individually and as a unit, that they will need to fight hard to get back to each other.
The catalyst for them all being in different places when all hell breaks loose is Aaliyah’s wedding which it will not surprise you to learn does not happen as the wedding planner envisaged; instead of sweet words of commitment, waltzes and drunkenly dancing, everyone has to find a way to get home, reunite and face the end of the world with the very people that they have been niggled by but who are the only thing standing between them and physical and emotional annihilation.
It’s gripping stuff and compelling as hell to read.
‘Yeah,’ Tanice agreed, gritting her jaw in fresh resolution.
‘We look after each other,’ Aaliyah said.
Chantale nodded as I [Briar] said, ‘We’re all we have.’
But what really sets Not With a Bang aside from the apocalypse genre pack is the way in which Oh zeroes in on the innate humanity of what it would feel like to be caught in such an extraordinary situation.
While there is a lot going on and Oh executes the actual act of near-annihilation graphically and with requisite intensity, what really concentrates the mind and makes you turn the page so fast you risk paper burns and cuts (a small price to pay) is how all these people who, don’t forget we know very well thanks to the author’s restraint and patience in not pressing the apocalypse button too soon, handle a situation that would send of us into a tailspin.
They all react as you would but they are guided to more lasting reactions and then plans of action by a driving need to be back with the people they love; they don’t always do this in a linear way and there is tension aplenty and setbacks galore so don’t expect some sort of slap happy, emotionally tinny storyline that acts like the apocalypse was the Best Thing Ever because it brought them back together; Not With a Bang is not that and thank goodness for that.
Rather, Not With a Bang marries action and humanity, events and people together so beautifully and groundedly that all of the fantastical elements, and trust us the extinction level is not the full story, not by a long way, feel hugely relatable and emotionally accessible, gifting us with a story that goes BIG and EPIC but which never loses sight of the people at its heart who simply want to live and be together with the people they love, now with added appreciation for how precious what they have together is.