I’ve been spending a fair amount of the past couple of weeks reading about epic floods, and about babies being shuttled through them on boats. This is one of the central plot points in Philip Pullman’s THE BOOK OF DUST, which I read last week, and also in Megan Hunter’s THE END WE START FROM, which I read immediately afterwards. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, or something about the Zeitgeist, but I suspect that it’s more the latter, as novelists increasingly develop scenarios of natural disaster that seem increasingly, and distressingly, close to reality.

In THE END WE START FROM, the nature of the disaster that precipitates the environmental and subsequent political crisis is left more or less vague. In fact, most of the details of the world surrounding the narrator and her small, fragile family are left intentionally hazy, relegated to the many white spaces in between the short bits of narrative, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps.

"Certainly the environmental crisis that propels the action in Hunter’s debut is compelling and horrific, even/especially since its true toll is glimpsed only in tiny shards and fragments... But the true drama is something far more universal, prosaic and nevertheless wondrous..."

The flood and its accompanying dangers arrive just as the narrator is going into labor with her first son, whom she and her partner R name Zeb, or Z (all the characters are known by their initials only). At first, the young parents flee to R’s parents’ home, but amid increasing dangers, R and the narrator eventually become separated, and the narrator and Z are left to navigate this unfamiliar new world surrounded by strangers, and sometimes alone.

Certainly the environmental crisis that propels the action in Hunter’s debut is compelling and horrific, even/especially since its true toll is glimpsed only in tiny shards and fragments: “Where I envisage welcomes and tea, smiles and Blitz spirit, there is grey concrete, wailing people dragging themselves across the road, photo-boards of the missing.” But the true drama is something far more universal, prosaic and nevertheless wondrous: the growing relationship between the narrator and her infant son, who is developing as a normal, happy child despite the strange and frightening (at least to his parents) world into which he has been born.

Hunter’s narrative continually asserts the joy and wonder of young motherhood, along with the uncertainty (especially given the circumstances) and the need for community and support. The narrator consistently surprises herself by finding delight and happiness in her child --- even despite her occasional misgivings about bringing him into the world: “I am thirty-two weeks pregnant when they announce it: the water is rising faster than they thought. It is creeping faster. A calculation error. A badly plotted movie, sensors out at sea. We hide under the duvet with a torch like children. I ask R if he still would have done it. If he had known.”

Interspersed with these short, sometimes startlingly personal, vignettes are passages taken from various religious and myth traditions from around the world, meaning-laden images of creation, destruction and life set adrift on the waves. These passages are meant to give Hunter’s story additional context and perhaps a bit more gravitas, but the truth of the matter is that, given the plausibility of the scenario she describes, her story --- despite its slight size --- has plenty of weight, importance and relevance already. Instead, these brief glimpses into the stories of the past give readers hope that the scenarios we might face now and in the near future will become themselves stories in the mouths of our descendants.