Maria Reva (Anya Chibis)

A malacologist, a bride, an interpreter, and a bride buyer meet on a romance tour on the eve of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is not the set-up to an off-colour joke told in a local watering hole, but the premise of Maria Reva’s new novel Endling. A trenchant eco-thriller with experimental touches, the book examines the ways regional conflicts render peacetime activities null and void, and how attempts to understand war in literature tend to fail in properly capturing the reality.

Yevusya “Yeva” Dmytrivna Paliy self-finances snail repopulation efforts by participating in Ukrainian “romance tours,” speed-dating socials where men pursue marriage with eligible women. Yeva pawns the gifts that wealthy men lavish on her, incrementally retrofitting her RV mobile lab with the latest in mollusk conservation tech.

While on the “Romeo Meets Yulia” tour, Yeva meets Anastasia “Nastia” Cherno and her English interpreter sister, Solomiya. The Chernos are the daughters of performance art darling Iolanta Cherno, and wish to rent Yeva’s RV to kidnap 12 bachelors – including the directionless Ukrainian-Canadian Pasha Gurka – to stage an anti-marriage industry protest. Yeva sees something in the 18-year-old Nastia that kindles a flame within her that she has not felt since rescuing her first snail in the south of Ukraine – a rare endling (the last of a species) she names “Lefty” because of his “wrong-whorled shell.”

As the Russians take command of the city of Kherson, Pasha breaks away from the RV, stumbling onto a pro-Ukraine protest; the rest of the RV passengers are not as lucky, and are coerced by Russian Armed Forces to help stage a propaganda film about the liberation of Ukraine from “Nazi” control. The site of filming problematically contains an acacia tree that the Russians want to torch, but it happens to house Lefty’s elusive female mate – and if Yeva is to make good on her decades-long calling, she will have to defy the orders of the invaders and put her life on the line.

Reva’s prose is shaped by the temperaments of her protagonists, alternating chapters privileging distinct points of view; Pasha leaves Vancouver in search of love, and his misty-eyed yearning informs the narrator’s descriptions in the same proportion that Yeva’s asexuality and loneliness suffuse her thoughts in melancholy.

But beyond these impeccable coups of characterization, Endling is particularly adept in presenting the peacetime freedoms that the advent of war renders dispensable.

“It’s what you all do, in the free world,” Pasha says after having had time to reflect on his experience of war. “You waste your freedom and your clear skies on things that don’t matter, like politeness and the perfect lawn. That’s why I can’t go back. I lived in a stupor and now, it’s like, all the colours are saturated. Like someone took electrodes to my eye rods and jolted them.”

The tally of war atrocities in Endling – a massacre along the Dnipro River is a major set piece – allows for an unbridgeable tension to open up within the text. The second of the book’s four sections interrupts the flow of the narrative by inserting Reva’s correspondence with a magazine editor who critiques her essay about humour in Ukrainian culture offsetting the calamities of life.

Stymied by the editorial impasse – the editor believes that the tone of Reva’s essay “would not quite fit the sensibilities of our readers” – Reva also reproduces portions of an art council grant application that work out her reservations about turning events of the war, accounts of which trickle in through news reports and social media, into something as frivolous as a novel.

“Now that Russia is conducting a full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” Reva writes, “the central conflict woven into the delicate fabric of my novel, namely an influx of Western suitors into Ukraine, has been subjugated … by a far more violent and destructive narrative. My novel (postnovel? yet-to-be-defined entity?) needs further tailoring to reflect these rapidly changing circumstances.”

These moments shatter the artifice of the novel, and even though the narrative resumes where it left off before Reva’s metafictional interruption, it becomes impossible to view Yeva, the Chernos, and Pasha as anything but avatars of a splintering if artfully constructed realism – one somehow at odds with the events of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Endling allows so much of the real world to enter its pages that its own coherence, its own suggestion of an artful resolution – on the level of character, plot, and even tone – is disrupted, much in the way that the grumbling thunder of real exploding missiles or the march of jackboots down an empty thoroughfare would disrupt an evening meal or cozying up with a Ukrainian Canadian’s war novel about snail conservation. Following this line of reasoning to comical lengths, the book even includes a fake ending about 100 pages in, where a miraculous, missile-resistant shield is erected over the entirety of Ukraine and Yeva and her friends are saved.

But this experimental impulse is not the product of a literary nihilism; it has its precedents in the alienation effect developed by Bertolt Brecht and the Situationist principles of Guy Debord, figures who foregrounded the material conditions of artistic creation so that a revolutionary fervour could be stoked in audiences.

In the same spirit, Reva’s Endling is a testament to a novel that could have once existed, but was rendered inutile by the course of history – a novel that could only pervert the memory of lost lives or offer false consolations about how (be it by grace of an invisible shield or some other plot contrivance) one day the “war will end, no more lives will be lost, no other invasions will occur elsewhere, either.”