Book review: The End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde

(image courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)

It has become apparent to all but the comprehensively deluded among us that the planet is in deep, sustained ecological trouble.

Wildfires whip through places annually that might’ve seen a terrible conflagration once a decade, droughts lay waste to once productive land and catastrophically violent storms are sweeping in with frightening regularity, destroying everything and often everyone in their path.

Climate change is, of course, the culprit in all these scenarios, and more, but while it is a clear and present danger, getting a personal grasp on what it might mean for all of us sometimes seems a bit far off and remote.

This is where hauntingly and beautifully written books like Maja Lunde’s The End of the Ocean come on.

The 2017 sequel (it was published in English for the first time in 2019) to the author’s worldwide bestselling The History of Bees, The End of the Ocean takes us on a journey across a number of interconnected decades and characters to chillingly lay out what will happen to our planetary home should we fail to act on climate change.

But rather than some raging polemic – though in some of the conversations, there is a necessary level of conservational zeal – what you get in this well-wrought novel are the stories of two groups of characters, both of which illustrate with powerful but affecting intensity what inaction on climate change could cost us all.

“For some people the mountains are a security blanket. They wrap themselves up in them, pull them over their heads to hold them in place. Magnus was like that, they made him feel calm, he said. I [Signe] never understood how he could think like that, because they loomed over me, I could feel their presence even when I was a child—the heaviness, the weight of them.” (P. 79)

In the present day of 2017, Signe in an ageing eco-warrior with her sights still firmly set on saving what is left of the stunning glacial beauty of her native Norway.

Under threat from those who want to divert its rivers and waterfalls for power generation and harvest its ancient glaciers to provide idiosyncratic ice cubes for wealthy Middle Eastern consumers, the environment of her local area, and that of the country and planet as a whole impels Signe to act radically to save what she can save.

But as she remains committed to the cause, one championed decades earlier by her father and opposed by her more capitalistic mother, her romantic relationship with childhood bestie Magnus weakens and fails, a casualty of two people with wholly different goals in life.

He was, however, by any marker, the love of her life, and when an opportunity presents itself to see him again, albeit under very unusual circumstances, she takes it and sets sails around Europe to prove a point and perhaps find what she’s lost.

Fast forward roughly 20 something years, and we are introduced to father and daughter David and Lou, who have fled their fire and drought blighted town in southern France, joining a stream of refugees who are heading north to the part of Europe that still has water and some sort of future.

Theirs is a harrowing story of survival, one marked by profound tragedy, a hard scrabble to put food and water in their mouths and a sense that whatever beauty and promise life offered is long gone.

But then they find a boat set up on blocks in a dry and abandoned garden near their refugee camp and they discover that maybe there is some hope left for them, after all.

Maja Lunde (image courtesy Simon & Schuster Australia)

In ways that are best left to the reading, which will consume you with its poetic poignancy and its moving, nuanced humanity, The End of the Ocean connects Signe, and David and Lou, underscoring not only how the choices made now will affect those in the future but how our individual actions can make a real difference to those in the not-too-distant future.

The weaving of two seemingly divergent stories movingly conveys how none of us are islands, even decades apart, and how while action of climate change may feel alarmingly academic, it definitely has real world consequences.

This is explored most movingly in the story of David and Lou who have lost pretty much everything that once defined their lives – their possessions are gone, the town they once lived in is unsalvageable ashes, and any sense of optimism that their present day troubles could be rescued are dashed in one sudden, fire-seared dash for survival.

It’s harrowing, both during and after these events, and we meet David and Lou as they arrive at a refugee camp in Timbaut, France, east of Bordeaux, hoping against hope that they’ll be reunited with the wife/mother and son/brother from whom they’ve been separated.

Their lives are bleak in one sense and at no time does Lunde stint on being brutally honest on how horrific life can be for people uprooted from everything they’ve known; even so, she is careful to show how deep and abiding the connection is between father and daughter who must rely almost wholly on each other to find a way beyond their current situation, assuming once exists at all.

“‘Then we won’t need water. We just need the ocean.’

She smiled faintly. The pressure in my chest returned.

‘And then we can stay out there for weeks,’ I said. For months. As long as we want. We can eat fish and make our own water. We can live on the ocean for the rest of our lives.’

‘I want to,’ Lou said. ‘I want to go all the way to the end of the ocean.'” (P. 348)

It is here, on a hot, windless day where water is scarce and life has been reduced to enervatingly scant basics, that David and Lou find the boat which soon becomes not simply a thing of escapist diversion – as an eight-year-old child, Lou is still able to see the fantastical and the possible, even on a boat miles from the ocean – and become connected with Signe in ways that will both warm and break your heart.

While there is a lot to be soberly sad about in The End of the Ocean, there is also a remarkable degree of vibrant humanity and unexpected hope.

Lunde at no time presents these elements as a panacea to the considerable facing humanity, and especially Signe, David and Lou, but they are important elements in an often desolate story because they remind us of people’s capacity to fight tenaciously on even when everything suggests this is a fool’s errand.

Reading The End of the Ocean is, for all its unshakeable honesty, an immensely rewarding undertaking because rather than sinking your motivation to solve the world’s climate crisis because what is the point if the powers that be can fight back with some establishment power, it emboldens you because you see in the beautifully affecting stories of Signe, David and Lou just how much we have to fight for, and that we cannot do it alone, because what one does, affects us all, not just down but well down through the years.

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