the end we start from by megan hunter

times literary supplement 10 January 2018

The narrator of Megan Hunter’s moving first novel envisages for herself “a water birth, with whale music, and hypnotism, and perhaps even an orgasm”. The reality is, of course, different and she leaves hospital “barely intact”. The change wrought in her by new motherhood is echoed by a change in the world around her: a flood is threatening to engulf England, making the narrator, her partner and their new baby refugees. The claustrophobia of life with a newborn is intensified by the apocalyptic drama unfolding around them. Retreating to the rural home of her partner’s parents, the narrator refers to the “tiny cabin that has become our world”.

This is a fragmented narrative and occasionally the ellipses are maddening. None of the characters are given full names: the narrator’s partner is called R and their baby Z. Her partner’s parents are G and N. The lack of names feels appropriately dystopian, but as the characters multiply, it is hard to remember exactly who O and C, F and H, B and W, D and L are. This is perhaps not the point: relishing the book involves a surrender to this kind of fractured world. It does not mean a reader should dispense with concentration, however, as every word in this distilled story needs to be focused on. Any reader finding our current news difficult to bear will smile wryly at Hunter’s assertion: “It is bad, the news. Bad news as it always was, forever, but worse. More relevant. This is what you don’t want, we realize. What no one ever wanted: for the news to be more relevant”.

The narrator is stoic in the face of the rising waters and the attendant loss of life until she is asked to strip at a checkpoint and her grammar breaks down: the absence of spaces between words communicates her trauma. The mundane jostles with terror for the narrator’s attention, as she reflects: “It seems it would be like [this] anywhere. Living on the moon, or hanging upside down from the ceiling, and arguing about teabags and hairs in the bath”.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.