Simon McDonald

In Reva’s Booker-longlisted Endling, three women, a snail, and an RV full of kidnapped bachelors travel through Ukraine. 

It’s a madcap premise. Without context, you might be thinking—huh?! And depending on your predilections, you’re either enticed or dissuaded. Really, the novel is nowhere near as absurd as that description implies. Endling grapples with profound concerns, ranging from the irrevocability of the sixth extinction, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, human trafficking and the exploitative world of mail-order brides, feminist resistance, and artistic paralysis. 

Reva introduces us to Yeva, a Ukrainian ecologist dedicated to collecting, housing and (hopefully) breeding snails facing extinction. She works for Romeo Meets Yulia, a “romance tour” company, in order to fund her mission.  It’s here she meets sisters Nastia and Solomiya, who are searching desperately for their missing mother while posing as a hopeful bride and translator. Unsuccessful thus far, they take inspiration from their mother—a fervent feminist activist—and kidnap twelve bachelors in the back of Reva’s van in order to expose the contemptibility of the industry. One of those bachelors is Pasha, who had returned to the land of his birth looking for love. He forms the final principal in this quartet of characters.

Everything about this setup screams “comic heist,” and for a long time, that’s the path I assumed we were headed down; until the novel veers hard into postmodernism, as Reva inserts herself into the narrative, prompted by Russia’s invasion, which supersedes whatever narrative she’d intended. Endling becomes a different beast, focusing on Reva’s crisis of conscience as she rebels against the inanity of the book she was writing, from the safety of her Canadian home, while her nation is under siege. Eventually we return to the RV, and the story of Yeva, the sisters, and Pasha—but the novel has irrevocably changed. 

I don’t particularly enjoy metafiction, but I can’t deny, it works impactfully here. I think I would’ve enjoyed the novel had it continued uninterrupted, but who’s to say; that narrative dissipated like smoke the moment Putin started dropping bombs.