First published in Norway in 2017; published in translation by HarperVia on January 14, 2020
The End of the Ocean is told from two perspectives in alternating chapters. Signe’s story begins in the present. David’s begins about 20 years later, when a drought is threatening his life and that of his daughter Lou.
David, with his son, daughter, and wife Anna, left southern France to make his way to a camp. In light of the water shortage, David felt a responsibility to stay at the desalination plant where he worked, but the electricity upon which the plant depends is no longer reliable. It is ironic, he thinks, that coal-fired power plants contributed to global warming and thus to the water shortage, yet producing more fresh water depends on those same power plants. Seeing no end to the vicious cycle, Anna insists that they try their luck at a camp where they might at least be able to find food. A raging fire leaves them with little choice.
Before David’s story begins, David and Lou are separated from Anna and his son. David arrives at the camp and waits for his wife to appear. His story describes his tormented wait as the camp’s food and water supplies dwindle. His relationships with Lou and with a damaged woman named Marguerite who befriends Lou in the camp grow more difficult every day. Eventually their survival may depend on whether it rains again, filling a channel that will allow them to travel to the ocean, where David can use his expertise in desalination to provide them with water for the rest of their lives.
The present from which the elderly Signe narrates her story is lived on a boat that she sails from Norway to France. She plans to make a grand gesture with a load of glacier ice that, before she stole it, was intended for sale to the wealthy.
Much of Signe’s story is told in memory, adding a third time frame to the story. Signe grew up in a Norwegian village but made her life in Bergen. A company purchased water rights to the Sister Falls. It intended to divert the water to a power plant, destroying Norway’s most scenic waterfalls. Signe’s mother owns a significant share of the company. The plan will make her wealthy. Signe’s mother has already argued with her father about an earlier plan to divert the waters of a river, a plan that destroyed local agriculture.
Signe lived with Magnus, whose family lost its farm after the river ran dry. Magnus was an engineer who viewed the destruction of nature as inevitable, a sign of human grandeur. The rift between Signe’s parents will eventually replicate in Signe’s relationship with Magnus, as Signe’s long-term concern with the environment clashes with Magnus’ short-term desire to accumulate wealth. Signe’s protest against delivering pure glacier water to the wealthy when climate change threatens the availability of water for everyone begins the novel and plays a central role in its ending.
The End of the Ocean is a cautionary story of environmental destruction, but emotional honesty is the novel’s strength. The novel imagines good people making hard choices, compelling the reader to share each character’s agony. Can Signe bear to give birth to Magnus’ baby? Can David allow Marguerite into his life if sharing a dwindling water supply with her will threaten Lou’s survival? If short-term survival is a fundamentally selfish act, is it better not to prolong one’s life?
The reader will spot the ending that ties the two stories together long before it arrives, but it is the ending that the reader will want. The novel builds suspense in both timelines while raising the kind of serious ethical questions that book club members might enjoy debating.
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