A locked chest sits at the end of a jetty in a small island town. The key to open it lies on a nearby bench. The town’s citizens believe the chest to be full of valuable coins. Should they open it? After deliberating, they come to the conclusion that the treasure would do them more harm than good. And so the chest remains untouched on the jetty until it is eventually pushed into the water.
When the chest is hauled to the surface generations later, the townsfolk are surprised and delighted to discover that the coins are gone and it now contains only cutlery. The forks and spoons are hardly worthless – the chest has enriched the founding story of the town and, anyway, these people already know that the wealth of their community lies in the social bonds formed by sharing food, warmth and shelter.
These coins are an important plot point in this beguiling debut. They are buried, hidden, discovered and hidden again over several generations. Ultimately their worth is determined by how they can serve the common good.
The End and Everything Before It presents an intergenerational saga, narrated in the form of fables such as the above. A couple named Isaac and Betty are the progenitors of the chest story – but so is the island, the sea and the trees in the forest beside which they make their home. What they did with their lives, says an elderly Betty to Isaac, was make patterns: “We live beside the sea and we made a life that is like the sea. We breathed in, and we breathed out. A million times. Others breathed with us. We all breathed together.”
The End and Everything Before It is filled with episodes that look very much like endings but turn out to be beginnings. Death, trauma, abandonment and war yield new communities, new families. The book is organised into five sections, the titles of which point to the cycles of repetition and renewal that provide the novel’s thematic heart and its structure: Ebbing, Flowing, Tilling, Sowing, Reaping. As Nella, Betty and Isaac’s granddaughter, reflects later in the novel, “Life is repetitions – we cannot expect the patterns of our yesterdays to unravel overnight and be knit anew.”
The reader is given few resources to locate the novel in time and space. The specifics are unimportant, as we are in the realm of allegory. We encounter six generations of Isaac and Betty’s descendants in The End and Everything Before It, each new generation carrying within them the lives of those who came before. Isaac inherits the land upon which the town is built from a malevolent uncle; Betty is the erstwhile maid of that uncle’s widow. The uncle and his widow are the novel’s villains because they use their wealth to sow cruelty and corruption. Isaac rejects his uncle’s legacy, sharing his wealth with his farmer-neighbours so that they can build the town: “I think back over a life gone wayward. And I think forward, imagining what men better than I might do next. And I decide.” His decision in favour of community yields generations of social harmony.
Betty and Isaac’s present-day descendant is Anja; along the way we spend time with Anja’s parents, Conor and Emma, as well as with Isaac and Betty’s granddaughter, Nella Sands. It’s not all about begetting – social connections are formed when lonely characters fall in love, when childless couples adopt children, when drifters choose new families, when people share their resources rather than hoarding them.
There are episodes of The End of the World and Everything Before that resemble realist fiction, but for Kruckemeyer fiction is a tool for imagining a new world rather than building a replica. Here he offers a dreamy alternative to the world that we live in, built as it is on the enclosure of land and the accumulation of capital.
Kruckemeyer is a renowned playwright and his works for children have been performed on stages in Australia and internationally. It is difficult to resist speculating about what he has brought with him from one medium to the other. The novel’s suite of striking and suggestive dramatic images give one answer to this question: that unopened treasure chest on the jetty, a girl who lives alone on a boat for four years, an orphaned child wailing alone outside the burning house in which his parents have perished. Kruckemeyer’s trust in these images, and in the leitmotifs of coins, forks and spoons, trees, birds and nests that accumulate across the novel, reveals his skill as a writer. So too does the pacing of his prose: this is a highly restrained novel narrated to an implacably steady allegretto rhythm. It deals with trauma and cruelty but withholds explicit representation of violence and suffering, opting instead to draw the reader’s attention to the possibility for renewal, trust and regeneration.
I read this novel as Europeans voted for the far right in elections for the European parliament, as Joe Biden mumbled and stumbled and Donald Trump lied and crowed, as Peter Dutton went nuclear, as a heatwave swept across Europe and the US, as the news media relayed a steady drone of hunger and war and political extremism. Against this backdrop of injustice and suffering, Kruckemeyer has authored a consoling fantasy, a parable of survival that attests to the value of resilient social bonds. We need writers who can anatomise the forces that are tearing our world apart – and we have them in abundance. Kruckemeyer has taken on a different task: envisioning what is required of us to build a world in which we can thrive.
The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer is published by Text ($34.99)
