book-reviews

The End of Everything is a haunting tale of a genteel apocalypse. An alien species, the iGhetti have invaded, creating a catastrophe. A war continues, confined entirely to the financial district of London. On the Kent coast of England, people are muddling through. Phillip Tennant survives by beachcombing the iGhetti artefacts that wash up on the shore, reminiscent of The Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. His aunt, Marnie, is a retired artist who plunders supplies from the abandoned holiday cottages. She’s confused and sweet, if occasionally murderous. Many people have set sail towards the shrouding mist in the hope that the Continent still exists and will offer sanctuary. Through it all, there’s a very British ethos of “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

The novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026. This is no mean feat for a science fiction novel. What does it all mean? You decide. For me, it’s a baroque reflection on fallible human nature.

More tangibly, how does Harrison create his effects? First, the aliens. We meet them only at the end of the book, where they’re described as follows:

“Looking north, she made out a single vast procession of the iGhetti, towering above the houses of Catford, Lewisham and Blackheath, moving east towards the sea—sometimes like the pure white plums of a phosphorous explosion, sometimes like great glittering chandeliers.”

Up to this point, we haven’t been clear what they were, or even if they existed at all. Harrison achieves this by offering tantalising snippets of conflicting rumour:

“Competing authorities associated the iGhetti with dark matter or with the banking crisis of the late 2000s, while others believed it to be less an invasion than a ‘re-enchantment of the world’, a process of spiritual tourism and gentrification pursued by advanced civilisations from a mooted ninth planet. More popularly, they were seen as having ‘come out of the internet… The Truth was simpler. They had leaked into our world long before, from the astral plane’.”

Second, Harrisson creates a malleable and unsettling world, where things don’t remain stable but can transform. The biological artefacts that Phillip harvests gradually become doppelgangers of their owners. And here, in a memorable passage, there’s a murmuration of pensioners:

“Too soon it was the hour of the soft warm light just before dinner, when the tourists take their drinks on to the balcony so they can sit and watch the ghosts of old men drawn out to sea, released from the mysterious dawn-to-dusk confinement of their commemorative benches along the north shore, to rise until they face out towards the lost continent. They arrive in ones and twos at first, unsteady-looking, balancing infirmly in the air, then suddenly there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of them rising from the warped mouldy slats and mysteriously folded ironwork of all the other benches in all the other towns of the Henry the Eighth Heritage Trail, and they’re driven out to sea until they’ve lost all individuality and they go wheeling through the characteristic yet unpredictable swings, the sudden folds, and recursive figures of the murmuration.”

Beloved is a masterwork. It takes its inspiration from a true story of an escaped slave who killed her baby rather than let it be taken back from the north of the US to the slave south, It is a novel about slavery, yes. But more, it’s about humanity and the enduring wounds injustice inflicts. Baby Suggs, for example, reflects on the danger of loving:

“The last of [Baby Suggs’] children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own—fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere. She didn’t know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how they held their heads when they walked.”

And also it’s about memory. The past is not done and buried in Sethe’s world. It lives on, most particularly in the form of Beloved, who she believes is the baby she killed, and who first returns as the poltergeist that haunts her home, then as the creature that sucks her dry.

These are strong, deeply human characters. Not just Black characters but people who show us what it means to be a person. There is, of course, the many-headed hydra of racism and the lies racists tell themselves to justify their oppression:

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right…. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them.”

But there is also the ambiguity that is at the heart of all of us:

“Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe… because every mention of her past life hurt…. But, as she began telling about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it”

Is there redemption in Sethe’s easing of her isolated pain? Or is it capture?

How does Morrison achieve these effects?

She does this in a variety of ways.

The existence of the past in the present is not just something Sethe asserts. It’s built into the structure of the novel with flashbacks and point of view changes that constantly braid past and present. The past, of course, is not a comforting time of fond memory, but one of humiliation and pain. Paul D’s tobacco tin of repressed memories exemplifies this:

“It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest. By the time he got to 124 nothing in this world could pry it open.”

Like Sethe, there is much about the past that is dangerous to him, Paul D’s tobacco tin is one of a number of recurring symbols. Another symbol is the whipping scar on Sethe’s back, which is described as being like a chokecherry tree. Does it symbolise the fraudulent beauty of “Sweet Home”, the place of Sethe and Paul D’s enslavement? Does it symbolise the ability of beauty to grow, even in horror? Or does it, perhaps, convey both meanings?

Biblical images and references are scattered through the story. The horsemen who come to take Sethe back to slavery are four in number. Baby Suggs’ sin of pride (if such it is) that restrains the community from warning Sethe of the coming of the four horsemen, is a huge feast that evokes the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.

And finally there is the symbol provided by Beloved herself. Dead baby, poltergeist, cunning and vengeful reincarnation. Sethe and her daughter Denver are seduced by Beloved, wanting her for themselves. Paul D is driven away by the apparition. What is she? Perhaps the burden of guilt, perhaps the desire for connection, perhaps … well you decide.