The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read The End We Start From by Megan Hunter for the Reading Rush challenge: read a book with 5 or more words in the title.

I picked up this book randomly at the bookstore with absolutely no expectations. The only thing I noticed about it was that the text was structured very poetically. The style is as if stream of consciousness and elegy merged together to create the floating and uncertain language appropriate for a dystopian novel centered around the flooding of the world (in a manner of speaking).

The story is narrated by a woman who is a new mother, separated from her husband for most of the book when a flood takes over London and forces most to flee. The language used in this mother’s narration compares birth and motherhood to the floodwaters, as well as using words associated with the sea for the development of her baby, one of them being the word “cruising”. The uncertainty of the floodwaters and the sea reflects the uncertainty of the mother and those she meets on her journey of survival. In between the mother’s narration, Hunter has inserted what seems to be quotes from the story of Noah’s Ark, almost completely parallel to the mother’s journey, the babies being brought up in the aftermath of the flood representing the renewal of the human race after Noah finds land.

I recommend this book to those who love poetic text, intertextuality, and the uncertain, free-floating images of water.



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