I know, I know, I’ve already done a newsletter on the end of the world. I don’t want to just retread the same old ground in this newsletter, even if my thoughts and my work definitely have certain…recurring themes. I’ve been thinking about writing this since I read Private Rites last year, and I suppose that now is as good a time as any.

Look, I don’t really think that anyone else feels the way that I do about these two books, but I read them pretty close together and they grew to occupy the same space in my mind. A story about the end of the world, not with a bang or a fire, but with a slow collapse. With the water, patient and slow.

Private Rites is the second novel by Julia Armfield, and is a story about the relationships and struggles between three sisters following the death of their father. If that sounds familiar, that would be because Private Rites is, of course, a loose retelling of King Lear. The thing that truly sets the book apart—besides, of course, that all three of our narrators are lesbians—is that it is set in the end of the world. The ocean is rising, streets have been replaced by boats and raised walkways, and the rain is so unceasing that even the briefest moments of sun bring the people crowding outside to catch just one last glimpse of it.

For the readers, that last glimpse comes very early in the novel. The sun will never reappear. It’s the end of the world, but all you can do is seal your windows and warm one another in each other’s beds. This is not a story with a happy ending.

Something that’s interesting is that until about five seconds ago, I would have sworn up and down that I read Private Rites before I Cheerfully Refuse. That isn’t true. Maybe it’s because, as I began to gesture towards, I Cheerfully Refuse acts in my mind as a kind of response to Private Rites. Rather than a city slowly drowning under years of rain, I Cheerfully Refuse, by Leif Enger, follows a man living on the bank of Lake Superior alongside his wife, and then in a small sail boat following her death. I won’t describe too much more of the plot, but Lark’s death is not a secret. It is in search of her that Rainy sets off, holding onto the fragile belief in a story they told one another, of rebirth, of a second chance.

The metaphor isn’t subtle, in either novel. The world is drowning. There is nothing you can do about it. It is this great, all-consuming thing, and yet you must live through it, and carry on. Grief is a heavy weight. “Why is it that everything we love dies, but our pain gets to be eternal” (this is a line from Dan Olson’s analysis of Annihilation that I explored in my last newsletter and yet it fits here. Themes. I’m sorry).

Private Rites is a far more complicated book than I Cheerfully Refuse. Its characters are complex and unlikable, driven by neuroses and the neglect and abuse they faced at the hand of their father. How can you love a man who hurt you. How can you hate a man you owe everything to, and who is dead, while you have to deal with the fallout. Private Rites is bleak and in parts surreal, drifting from the grounded if melancholic tone of the main narrative to interludes that feel like peaking around the corner of an unlit stage to see a performance beyond your comprehension playing out before you. Despite all of that, it is still a story about connection, about the bonds between sisters, the love you can still have for other people in what seems to be the end of everything. It is only when our three narrators with their disparate points of view choose to come together that—

I won’t spoil the book. This is not a story with a happy ending. This is not a world where the dead come back to life.

Well, neither is the tired world of I Cheerfully Refuse.

Perhaps a better analogue for I Cheerfully Refuse would be Swamplandia!, by Karen Russel. Another journey by boat, another journey seeking lost loved ones spat out again by the gates of hell, but where Swamplandia! tears away the illusion to reveal horribly human failures of the machine beneath it, I Cheerfully Refuse is…ultimately…hopeful.

One of the subplots, or perhaps through-lines of I Cheerfully Refuse is the presence of the drug known only as ‘willow’, which is quite simply a suicide drug. It allows those who take it one more moment of contentment and peace before they quietly drift off into the end of their life. I said the metaphor wasn’t subtle. That didn’t stop me from sobbing like a baby multiple times throughout the novel. Perhaps the part that hurts most about I Cheerfully Refuse is that, despite everything, despite every loss and death and choice that leaves behind an empty space where a person used to be, it is a story so full of community. I think that it is that kind of community that so many of us lack in our modern lives. I can’t help thinking of the isolation and insular lives and relationships that pull Private Rites through to its conclusion alongside the reaching hands of I Cheerfully Refuse which tell you that, even at the end of the world, you don’t have to be alone.

There are two ways to face the end of the world.

What I’m reading right now:

Currently cutting my teeth on The Traitor Baru Cormorant, which has been making me claw at the walls. I deserve one book a year that sparks that specific something in my head. I am, however, about to start reading Orlando which will be a completely different feeling. Wish me luck.

An album to listen to:

I was going to recommend Death in the Business of Whaling as being very thematically appropriate, but then i realized, horror of horrors! I am too predictable, and my past self had already done so. Please accept, instead, Get Ugly, by Trophy Wife, which has been on repeat in my headphones while I’ve been in the lab for the past week.

What I’m working on:

You might have noticed (or not) that I’ve removed some of my Stars Like Darting Fish extracts. These ‘what I’m working on’ segments will likely get a bit sparser, but today I do have something fun to share: I went ever so slightly insane and spat out a fun sci-fi noir pastiche which is definitely not hiding a totally different story inside of it, and it was so satisfying to get something down without struggling…well…at all.

The lights are down low, simulating night, glowing windows illuminating the haze of rain. Passersby scurry on their way to work or home or the dining halls, heads ducked against the rain. Like this, I can almost imagine Get Lost is a city somewhere, one piece of a larger whole falling slowly into darkness. Dark towers reaching for a sky beyond the mass of Hub at the centre of it all. Retaining walls mountains instead of the sheer masses of polymer and steel.