The End We Start From

“When I was a child I thought I had been chosen for our times. The ending times. The creeping times.”

Because the narrator is living through an unprecedented flood, her reflection on her childhood fears seems like a prophetic premonition. The uncanny nature of the narrator’s reminiscence here is represented by the sentence fragments, each using a new adjective to emphasize the unsettling nature of these times.

“We hide under the duvet with a torch like children. I ask R if he still would have done it. If he had known. He doesn’t answer.”

Many expecting parents have reservations about bringing children into a world with so many problems. Although the characters knew that a climate crisis was on the horizon, they wanted a child, and the narrator asks her husband if the new information about evacuation would have changed his desire to have a baby with her. He cannot answer, highlighting the uncertainty they are both experiencing. While having a child is an adult milestone, the narrator uses a simile to compare her and her husband to children, highlighting their powerlessness in the face of the upcoming crisis.

“In the bed across from me a girl possibly just young enough to be my granddaughter cuddles her toddler on one side and her newborn on the other. Schoolboys come to visit her and let their eyes roam over my udders as they pass.”

The narrator’s observations in the maternity ward use disturbing language to discuss birth, introducing the novel’s meditations on sexism and gender dynamics. The young girl with two children raises questions about whether this young girl has endured some other tragedy. Her youth—and the corresponding youth of her children and her visitors—makes the narrator worry for her, even as the narrator feels dehumanized and objectified by the schoolboys’ gaze.