The Stranding

Kate Sawyer

Hachette

Otago Daily Times, July 1st 2021

Like Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men, The Stranding explores the end of life as we know it, but Kate Sawyer’s beautiful tale could not be more different from that of her compatriot. It opens with two strangers watching helplessly as a stranded whale draws her final breath, the sky above them burning pink with their approaching death, a fate they will cheat by sheltering within the cetacean’s all-enveloping maw. This single, timeless moment forms a fulcrum around which the novel pivots, one story-line tracing the woman, Ruth’s, path from the bustling heart of London to this isolated Northland beach, the other following her and her new companion, Nik, as they emerge from their refuge and carve a place for themselves for themselves in the ash-filled landscape, maybe the only people left on Earth.

Told in the intimate first person and primarily from Ruth’s perspective, the focus is not so much on the pair’s survival as on the relationships between them, and Ruth’s discovery of her own inner strength and purpose. The London sections of the novel reveal a life lacking in direction or commitment: a job as a primary school teacher that is more an occupation than a vocation and an affair with a married man that quickly progresses from romantically illicit to controlled and stifling. The New Zealand passages trace Nik and Ruth’s relationship as it moves from mutual dependence into partnership and love. It is not an easy life, but each brings strengths that complement the other, allowing them not only to survive but thrive, living long enough to bring two daughters into the world and equip them with the skills they need to forge their own paths into an uncertain future.

What exactly has destroyed humanity is never made explicit; Ruth is aware of increasing geopolitical tensions but deliberately avoids following the news, and the end for Britain comes while she is in transit to New Zealand, leaving her in ignorance. Nik, too, has been living in deliberate isolation from the world, and his own past remains by and large a mystery. There are glimpses of the loss and grief that brought him to a lonely shore at the end of the world, but what they build between them has its foundations in the shared present rather than the individual pasts.

Although this is Sawyer’s first novel, her background in stage and screen is evident throughout. Her language is rich and evocative, with the sense that every word serves a purpose, and while the landscape as seen through Ruth’s eyes is not iconically New Zealand, it is vividly and tangibly described. The plot may not have the circumstantial immediacy of The End of Men, but it tells a compelling tale whose strength lies as much in what is unsaid as in what is on the page. The Stranding is a novel whose depth and authenticity allowed me to lose myself in its reality, a blend of love, loss and hope from which I was reluctant to emerge.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/end-men-and-stranding