Australian poet Maria Takolander gives her version of a dystopian world in her latest novel The End of Romance. The book is a dark vision of the future that draws heavily on some other seminal dystopian works. It is dark and depressing and so not for the faint-hearted.
The End of Romance is divided into four different narratives. The first involves Marianna who is trying desperately to protect her eight-year-old son. The pair live together in an abandoned house and scavenge from the houses around them. Marianna has had to enrol her son in school where he will be trained until he is sixteen. At sixteen all males are sent to fight on a distant Earth-like planet called Promised Land (the second section of the book is a transmission from the first people to be sent to the planet Eevan and Adan). Marianna wants to escape with her son and she takes her chance when she finds a deserter living on the outskirts of the ravaged town. The third part of the book is narrated by Josip, the eighteen-year-old who Marianne inveigles to take them out of the city and the fourth section are the boy’s journals.
Takolander delivers a dark and confronting world. The world is breaking down and people scavenge from the dead; schoolboys wear white boilersuits and balaclavas (shades of A Clockwork Orange) and are encouraged to be violent; the ground itself is hard and unforgiving. And then her three characters leave the relative safety of the city and go out into the wilderness where things are even more wild in a journey reminiscent (in more than one way) of Cormack McCarthy’s The Road.
The End of Romance is heavy with biblical imagery and allusion. The main characters are Marianne (Mary) and Josip (Joseph), the first people to go to the planet of the Promised Land are called Eevan (Eve) and Adan (Adam). Josip himself was raised in a monastery. At one point Josip gives the boy his only book – a copy of The Gospels for Young Readers – and it is in this, with its blank pages for notes, that the boy keeps his journal. It is unclear, though, to what end.
The End of Romance is a fitting title to a novel that has no romance in it whatsoever, and in fact most interactions are the opposite of romance. Takolander describes a world where everything is violent and transactional and people are scraping to survive, their only hope is a distant one that seems to be a false dream. The world-building beyond this is sparse and there are aspects that are never fully explained. The End of Romance is bleak and confronting but there seems to be no purpose to the narrative other than perhaps to serve as a cautionary view of a future that is governed by violence.
The End of Romance by Maria Takolander
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