Endling lives up to the promise of author Maria Reva’s previous book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, a terrific novel-in-stories set in an apartment building in Ukraine.Supplied
- Title: Endling
- Author: Maria Reva
- Genre: Fiction
- Publisher: Knopf Canada
- Pages: 352
Reading Maria Reva’s novel Endling, I kept thinking of A. A. Milne’s short, whimsical poem The Four Friends, the latter consisting of an elephant named Ernest, a lion named Leo, a goat named George and a snail, James. Over the course of five stanzas, the largest animals make increasingly ostentatious scenes – Ernest trumpets and raises a rumpus, Leo roars and kicks – while James gives the unheard “huffle of a snail in danger,” then spends the rest of the poem crawling from one end of a brick to the other.
Endling foregrounds a similar clash between the antics of large mammals (humans, to be precise) and the quiet going-about of the common snail – the novel’s protagonist, Yeva, being a Ukrainian malacologist whose work, quite literally, involves protecting snails in danger.
The continual dying out of snail species has made Yeva’s profession a tad depressing of late. Still, she dutifully records the expiry date of each endling – a term meaning the last of its kind. Sometimes, she texts those digits to the one person she knows will understand them, a snail conservationist in Hawaii named Kevin.
The obscurity of their work has brought Yeva and Kevin close, despite the vast ocean between them. But unlike Kevin, Yeva isn’t interested in taking things to the next step, relationship-wise. In fact, sex and love do nothing for her at all. What does interest her is finding a mate for an endling called Lefty before it’s too late.
Yeva funds her research through gigs at a romance-tour agency, “Romeo Meet Yulia,” which introduces Western bachelors to would-be Ukrainian brides. It’s in this context that Nastia, an 18-year-old bride from the agency, approaches Yeva about the plan she’s concocted to put a halt to “the bridal industry machine” by kidnapping a group of bachelors – a stunt she hopes will draw the attention of her activist mother, who disappeared a few months ago.
After Yeva overcomes her initial reluctance, the three women (with them is Nastia’s sister, Sol) soon find themselves on the open road with a baker’s dozen of unwitting bachelors in the back of Yeva’s RV, which also serves as a mobile lab. But the plan hits a snag: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an event so monumental it threatens to make their hostage-taking look trivial in comparison.
It’s at this juncture that Endling begins living up to the promise of Reva’s previous book, the terrific novel-in-stories Good Citizens Need Not Fear. Starting off as a solid satire about the international marriage industry, Endling is ultimately less like The Bachelorette than The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, Marcel Duchamp’s surrealist artwork from the early 20th century.
Nastia and Sol’s doubts about their scheme soon extend to their author – a fact evidenced by the sudden breaking down of the fourth wall in the novel’s second part. There, we get a series of exchanges between Reva and a magazine publisher, who’s objecting to the joking tone of the essay he asked her to write about the invasion’s effect on the Ukrainian expatriate community, followed by a travel grant application for a novel-in-progress set in Ukraine, in which Reva assures the granting body that she’ll “treat the subject of war with ultimate gravitas.”
What is the correct response of art to trauma? Are the members of a diaspora allowed to live normal lives while war decimates their homeland? The questions Reva raises here are familiar, the way she goes about answering them less so.
After a false ending – replete with acknowledgments, an author bio and a hilariously apocryphal “note on the type” – Endling sallies forth, following its characters as they drive hundreds of kilometres to Kherson, where Yeva plans to follow up on a hot tip: It seems a certain acacia tree in a certain field might contain a lifesaving mate for Lefty. Woven into that quest is a clever, poignant subplot in which Nastia attempts to coax the grandfather of the marriage agency’s Canadian owner (in reality: Reva’s) out of his Kherson apartment.
Mayhem ensues. The snail rescue gets delayed when Nastia gets co-opted into taking a leading role in a Leni Riefenstahl-style Russian propaganda film shoot, which in turn gets swarmed by a horde of angry locals, with no one entirely sure who’s acting and who’s for real.
What Reva effectively pulls off here is a mixing of classic screwball comedy tropes – romance! misunderstandings! mistaken identities! – with far more serious, topical themes: fake news, climate-induced extinction and a terrible, still-raging war among them. When the women tell the bachelors they’re releasing them owing to the Russian invasion, for example, the men, many of whom are still holding out hope of finding their bride, decide it must be a ruse to steal their cellphones, and angrily demand refunds. The Russians, meanwhile, their bellies brimming with government Kool-Aid, blithely enter Kherson assuming they’ll be greeted as liberators.
In the end, it’s Yeva’s single-minded act of faith – the Snail Mary pass, as it were, to get Lefty to the end of his proverbial brick – that feels like the least absurd thing in this wonderfully absurd novel.
