Tectonic Ruptures, Biblical Raptures and Nuclear Blasts

Wendy Parkins

End Times by Rebecca Priestley (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 232pp, $35

 

In mining, the material (like rocks and soil) overlying a mineral deposit is called the overburden. It is an evocative term to describe the stuff that needs to be removed before extraction of what is deemed valuable can take place, and one particularly pertinent to End Times, which is Rebecca Priestley’s account of a West Coast road trip by two old friends, one trained in geology, the other in mining engineering. During a lockdown reprieve in 2021, Priestley and her friend Maz visit mining sites and the towns that have flourished or declined alongside them, while also taking time to observe significant features of the changing natural environment like fault lines and retreating glaciers.

Along the way, Priestley thinks about change in all its forms, a professional concern in her day job as Professor at Victoria University’s School of Science in Society but also a personal preoccupation that she began to explore in her previous book, Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica (2019). Priestley is not afraid to bring the personal and the scientific into close contact, rejecting the idea that a commitment to science is at odds with strong feelings about the planet and the people and other creatures we share it with. But she is thrown when she meets locals who cling to fictions about permanence, which they insist are based on personal observation (and are thus irrefutable). How can we continue to talk to each other across this kind of divide? What do we share? How can we work together? The science professor in conversation with those who ‘do their own research’ is a recurring—and troubling—theme for Priestley, who is anxious to explore what kind of connection or community is still possible in these precarious times.

Both road-trippers also share deep-seated family associations with the West Coast, adding a layer of personal history to the women’s travel experiences that sometimes results in serendipitous discoveries but at other times exposes the half-truths of family myths, another domain where fact and fiction can be hard to distinguish. Through this journey with Maz, though, Priestley wants to excavate more than the history of previous generations of Coasters. She wants to make sense of her lifelong obsession with disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse:

The End Times have always seemed imminent, and I’ve been perpetually alert for tectonic ruptures, Biblical raptures, nuclear blasts, the metaphorical ticks of the Doomsday Clock’s second hand. Through the decades, the End Times have travelled along with me, taking on new forms, gathering in new fears.

Interspersed with Priestley’s account of her week on the Coast, then, is her story of growing up in the 1980s, when she and Maz channelled their youthful rebellion into punk and protest before settling on Pentecostal Christianity as the solution to their—and the planet’s—problems. Priestley brings a refreshing, non-judgemental curiosity to this aspect of her past as she seeks to explain how it was possible to find refuge (for a time) in a form of faith that envisioned apocalypse as inevitable.

Across the Tasman, I, too, spent the 1980s discovering feminism and marching in anti-nuclear protests while devoting most of my time to church (Evangelicalism, in my case)—a strange blend of idealism and despair that eventually collapsed under the weight of irresolvable contradictions. I left the church for good, but Priestley is more forgiving about her former faith. It may have been ‘a waste of energy’, she writes, an exchange of one kind of struggle (against racism, sexism and nuclear war) for a more extreme, if intangible, one, but she concludes that ‘There was something real there, something we can’t explain away.’

I couldn’t help but feel that Priestley’s approach may have made explaining this phase of her life even harder. She mentions in passing that she and Maz each subsequently spent time in therapy and that their embrace of Christianity could have been a kind of misplaced revolt against their ‘progressive, secular, liberal upbringings’, but in choosing to write the chapters about this adolescent phase in first-person plural, Priestly de-personalises the account, collapsing the young Rebecca and Maz into a single entity that raises more questions than it answers. I understand the conflation of identity that the ‘groupthink’ of a strict belief system requires, as well as the intense closeness of friendships in adolescence/early adulthood, but in speaking for Maz in this way, Priestley precludes digging deeper into her own personal motives, fears or desires, such as when she describes the day the two friends first received the Holy Spirit: ‘we felt fizzy and elated and peaceful and excited all at the same time’. Do we really believe the two friends were so entirely in synch in this experience, registering the exact same mix of emotions? If not, what does it mean that Priestley speaks for Maz in this way? Later, when they begin to withdraw from their faith, Priestley writes: ‘we both started to feel tired and unwell. For a while we had to ease up on going to church all the time. We thought it best to spend a bit more time at home, reading and resting.’ Again, I wondered if I believed that both women experienced the same symptoms and came to the same conclusions at the same time, and whether disentangling the two women’s responses here might have deepened the important story Priestley wants to tell.

In her Acknowledgements, Priestley credits a writing workshop for giving her the prompt of ‘writing in the first-person plural’ that ‘got me started on the teenage narrative that is one thread of this book’. She goes on to thank Maz for ‘letting me tell this story on behalf of her too’ but I was left with a lingering sense that the ‘we’ in Priestley’s narrative was doing too much heavy lifting. In this context, it is interesting that on the road trip, only Priestley is troubled by proximity to the Alpine Fault, needing an escape route planned out before she can sleep at night. Maz is sympathetic but more sanguine, whether due to her training as a mining engineer or a different attitude to risk more generally.

Do such differences between the two friends result from the divergent paths their lives have taken since their church days, or do they indicate that those earlier life choices may not have been entirely derived from the shared feelings previously ascribed to their younger selves? Priestley’s lifelong apocalyptic dread may have been influenced by the nuclear proliferation of the 1980s—and the emotionally charged films, books and TV dramas that it generated—but perhaps it had a deeper source closer to home that is never fully explored here.

Priestley’s attention to friendship, however—why it endures, how it sustains us—shines out strongly throughout, reminding us that a vital part of figuring out how we might find the resilience to live well in end times is rediscovering ‘how to have friends, how to be a friend’. Far from a trite truism, Priestley’s emphasis on friendships formed early in life suggests that such connections can ground us and give us purpose in the kinds of ways her younger self once sought in more dramatic forms through the pyrotechnics of Pentecostalism. With the hindsight of maturity and the sharpening of perspective that many experienced during lockdow  n, Priestley invests the ordinary challenges of daily living with renewed value and seeks to discover how to ‘be here now’. Never before has now presented such a challenge for everyday life; 2023 has been recorded as the hottest year on the planet since records began and social divisions at home and abroad seem to widen on a daily basis. Perhaps, though, as Priestley implies, there is no more powerful response to the anxieties and fears of end times than this: to pay attention and be present—for yourself, for others, for the planet. In this way, End Times offers readers both a challenge and a comfort.

Despite the dark themes she touches on, Priestley’s writing style is simple and unembellished. She is honest about her purpose in this book, telling us early on ‘this isn’t a holiday for me, I’m working, interviewing a few people, taking lots of notes, writing about it all’. At times, this results in information dumps that stall narrative momentum, and at each destination we come to expect there will be at least one colourful character. And lots of pies. The interview with the climate-change-denying mayor is perhaps given too much space, but other episodes grip the reader powerfully, like the risky night-time excursion with two strangers to see a glow-worm display, where Priestley realises that wonder and danger are close enough to be indistinguishable in the dark.

After a mine is deemed no longer viable, the overburden may be repurposed as part of the reclamation process. What has been discarded might still have value, but that might involve looking more deeply at a vein that has been there all along before we cover it over once more. Reclamation is perhaps always precarious, unfinished; a journey, rather than a destination, and one never taken alone.

 

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WENDY PARKINS is an Ōtepoti Dunedin writer. She is the author of Every Morning, So Far, I’m Alive: A memoir (2019) and An Idle Woman, a historical novel to be published this year.