Louise Swanson
Hodder & Stoughton, 23 March 2023
Available as: HB, 320pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529396102
I'm grateful to Hodder for letting me have an advance e-copy of End of Story via NetGalley to consider for review. This was a book I was keen to read, having loved Swanson's previous novels, written as Louise Beech, and also her very moving memoir, Daffodils.
End of Story follows author Fern Dostoy's life in a near future, nightmarish world so close to our own. Or perhaps I should say ex-author Fern Dostoy's life, because in this future, fiction has been banned. Writers, agents, publishers and booksellers are proscribed, sometimes sent for 're-education' and are generally shunned. Fern has been dispossessed of her career, her home, her books, even her name, and allotted a job as a hospital clearer. Sinister Government functionaries - 'the tall one and the short one' she always calls them - visit her unannounced, question and threaten her, and search for books or signs of writing.
To a book obsessive like me this is of course a truly dreadful future. No new novels to consume (or old ones for that matter). No bedtime stories for sleepless kids. No book groups. No book blogs, either, I guess. As Fern tells her story we learn how the very centre of her existence, the things she created and whose creation gave her life meaning, have been taken from her by a government that blames fiction in general, and one of her books in particular, for all manner of ills - and which has worked up an angry mob to enforce its prohibition.
I said "as Fern tells her story" but in this world, storytelling has been banned. Keeping an illicit journal in a notebook, as she does, marks her therefore as still defiant - even if, as she assures us, non fiction is surely still permissible? But Fern goes further in challenging the new rules, discovering a clandestine story-reading helpline for those restless kids who have been denied the joy of fiction. She eagerly participates - it seems she suffers a particular pain at seeing them denied stories - but an atmosphere of threat hangs over the whole enterprise.
I was reminded to some extent of Nineteen Eighty Four, especially the secret, handwritten diary. However, End of Story goes to much, much weirder places. Fern becomes concerned that events in this grim future are echoing her most recent book, Technological Amazingness. Something - or someone - also seems to be trying to pass messages to her, but are they friendly or not? Stranded amidst a December heatwave, Fern's life seems to be spinning out of control and 'the tall one and the short one' begin to call more often...
It's actually hard to find words for how brilliant End of Story is - especially when there are aspects it's best not to discuss because that would spoil the book. At its centre it is I think an exploration of grief: Fern has lost so much, and is in a sense mourning. She also clearly feels guilt for what has happened - however much it is clearly not her fault, she only wrote a book - and perhaps a need to atone for that. Beyond the menace, there is something desperately sad in her relationship with the Men in Black who come calling. I reflected that there is a sense in which they are the only people with whom she is permitted to discuss what she has lost - anyone else would be horrified, would push her away.
Perhaps almost the only people? We also meet 'Fine-Fayre', a door to door salesman for a company selling tea and biscuits (what a brilliant idea). We never learn his real name, but he is in many respects the most human character in this story, apart from Fern herself. Many of the others have a slightly chilling quality, her colleagues in the hospital for example concocting bizarre schemes which they seem keen for her to overhear as she cleans the meeting room, her friends at Story Tellers on edge necessarily.
Indeed, throughout the book, Swanson creates a more and more uncomfortable - can I be pretentious and say unheimlich? - atmosphere, initially founded on the outrageous banning of fiction but increasingly taking in the, well - words rather fail me again here - the texture of Fern's relationship with the world she's in? The sense that she is struggling to hold on to reality - or perhaps that it is trying to reject her? It's a book that could almost be a ghost story (it isn't!) a book featuring a sort of haunting. The kind of book that hooks you, keeps you reading just another bit, and another bit, puzzling over what's happening. The kind of book that wraps you in itself, that you need to read with tissues to hand as the depths of Fern's suffering are - oh-so-slowly - explored.
Simply a thrilling, heartbreaking but also triumphant story. You really need it in your life!
For more information about End of Story, see the publisher's website here.
No comments:
Post a Comment