How many of us utterly ignore the news because it's too depressing? In Kate Sawyers 'The Stranding', Ruth does just that. Preoccupied with relationships, including one with a married man who leaves his family for her, she turns away from the anxiety of a world in chaos and the threat of war, as well as missing all the red flags of a man who disallows her a life in favour of his good looks and sex appeal. It's a claustrophobic relationship - not only does Alex control her and limit her, but she is cloistered by the monotony of life where essentially, she is not truly living. Whether or not she realises it 'before', she certainly finds a way to live in the 'after'. In many ways this is the story of the pandemic we all just lived through where we find what is truly important, often shedding most of our old selves as we went.

But the book is more than the lament of a woman who awakens to her own power - it's about a woman who awakens to her own power because she is forced to because she runs so far away from her problems that she is ultimately forced to face them. Stranded on a beach in New Zealand with the entirety of her world gone dark due to a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere, she faces the loss of every one she loves and only minutes or hours til the sky lights up and the world is over. As I read I was reminded of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, a post-apocalyptic novel set in Australia after a global nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere. As lethal radiation drifts south, the survivors in Melbourne confront their inevitable fate. In fact, the books share many of the central themes.

"The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissi were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds."
— Nevil Shute (On the Beach)

Ruth has less time than that, however, stranded with a total stranger with a beached whale they helplessly watch die. Whilst her first choice is to fuck as the sky lights up - what else can one do - he has other ideas, pulling her into the mouth of the whale.

Such a mythic image requires suspending all disbelief of course. How far away from a blast does one have to be to make survival in a whale possible? On the hunt to find whales, Ruth is instead saved by one, albeit blistered and raw as they emerge to the falling ash and utter devastation around them. It seems that they are quite possibly the only people left alive.

"All those cities, all those fields and farms, with nobody, and nothing left alive. Just nothing there. I simply can't take it in." — Nevil Shute (On the Beach)

Lucky she happens to be beached with the only man in her life that isn't an utter prick. I also had to suspend disbelief here. How she fled from the arms of a narcissist to a guy she could spend the rest of her days with and walk in her own power was more the miracle than surviving in a whale.

All cynicism aside, I really enjoyed this book. I liked how it both moved away from the beginning - Ruth in England - and moved toward it, so the final scenes of her 'before' life are played out in grief in a foreign country where she scrolls through her phone looking at photos and finding the dial tone ringing out to her parent's place, where presumably there are no survivors at all. The image of Ruth arriving just as the departures board shows 'cancelled' to all outgoing flights is reminscent of how the world stopped during COVID, so this is an isolation that we can all be familiar with in some way.

I also appreciated how Sawyer suggests that it doesn't matter how informed you are - the ones who pay attention to the news, like Ruth's Dad and her boyfriend - don't survive. The politics of what happened to create the event don't matter - it's what happens next that does, and how Ruth and Nik keep the fire going, just as the nameless man in Cormac Maccarthy's 'The Road' stresses - that the survivors are keeping the flame of humanity alive. I'm also reminded of 'Leave the World Behind' where the apocalyptic event itself is unnamed. One doesn't have to know the details to feel the anxiety of uncertainty and the horror of the aftermath of things of which we have very little control.

Essentially, this was a women's survival book - this is reinforced by Ruth's bearing of two daughters that will carry their parents fire. Don't let that turn you off though - it's a really good, well written read you'll finish in a day, just as I did.

With Love,

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