The God of Endings, by Jacqueline Holland
This is an extraordinary book, which has received much praise.
It begins rather ominously: “When I was a child, the dead were all around us. Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s. Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse—until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead? Many folks found this proximity to death and its souvenirs discomfiting, but my father was the first gravestone carver in the village of Stratton, New York, which meant that the distillation of death and grief into beauty was our family business.”
As one might expect from this beginning, life and death, mortality and immortality, beauty in the form of natural beauty and in art, are among the themes of this story, expressed in many different ways.
It is the story of Collette LeSange, a Frenchwoman teaching fine arts to the children of upwardly mobile parents an upstate New York town in the year 1984. Except—and it is very big except—Ms. Collette, as the children call her, is not at all what she seems. Her real name is Anna, she was born in 1824 in a small American town (not far from where she lives now) . . . and she is a vampire. At the age of ten, she lost most of her family to a tuberculosis pandemic then sweeping New England. Her superstitious neighbors, convinced the disease was the result of dead people leaving their graves to feed on the blood of the living, applied the only cure they knew: to burn the dead and feed their ashes to their surviving relatives. In one of the most gruesome and heart-wrenching scenes we see Anna and her brother, already dying, forced to consume the ashes of their father.
But as we will learn, her neighbors knew as little about vampires as they did about TB. Neither do we, as it develops. Anna is resigned to die and join her loved ones, when her step-grandfather, Vadim Semonov, arrives and takes her away to live with himself and her grandmother—until one day, when her death becomes inevitable, he turns her into what he is himself: a vampire. “This world, my dear child, all if it right to the very end if there is to be an end, is a gift. But it’s a gift few are strong enough to receive. I made a judgment that you might be among those strong few . . . I thought you might find some use for the world, and it for you. But if not, my sincerest apologies for the miscalculation.”
As the weary decades pass, as there seems no way out for her, no way but to witness an endless cycle of man’s inhumanity to man, Anna regards herself as a monster, mourning the fact that she was given no choice in what she was to become. (Though as the previous sentence indicates, the most monstrous deeds she witnesses are performed by ordinary humans, through their wars, their prejudices, misogyny, and cruel superstitions.) Anna is no typical vampire, spending her nights stalking her victims. Except for one period in France when she hunts and kills invading German soldiers—but this is to protect the community where she has found a temporary home, not to indulge her appetite—for the most part she subsists on the blood of animals, and tries to do as little harm as she can, though in this she is not always successful.
If her long life teaches her anything, it is the fragility of happiness in a harsh world. In one of the brighter, but all-too-brief interludes, she meets a Jewish artist and naturalist living in the wilderness, who becomes her lover and teaches her to paint, thus fostering her enduring love of art. Yet it is in one of their most joyful moments that he is suddenly stricken down, as the lives of humans are also fragile.
The novel, all told from Anna’s first-person viewpoint, goes back and forth between 1984 and earlier eras, centering around episodes of sadness, joy, and terror, crossing the Atlantic among the desperately poor on an emigrant ship, living in Eastern Europe, France, and Egypt. However, there are gaps in the narrative, including the time between the end of WWII and the 1980s. As far as we know, she only meets three other vampires, her grandfather, his servant, and a boy about her own age. Otherwise, she lives among the short-lived vremenie (that is, mortal humans), largely ignorant of herself and her own kind. But we, the readers, see that she is not much like other literary vampires. She has no inherent powers of fascination; she is strong, but not super-hero strong. She can walk in the light of day. In fact, the sun doesn’t seem to bother her at all. In a moral sense, she longs to live in the light, but seems doomed too often to witness or experience darkness.
When we meet her in 1984 her hunger for blood is inexplicably growing, which presents a danger for the children she teaches, especially a sickly but exceptionally gifted boy named Leo. Leo comes from an abusive home. She knows it would be unwise to grow too close to the boy, but his talent calls to her, and it is difficult to figure out which of his parents is responsible for the abuse: his manipulative, drug-addicted mother, who tries to draw Anna/Colette in as a part-time babysitter, or his cold step-father. One of them is lying about the other, but how is she to know which one, and in the meantime, how can she best protect Leo—including protecting him from herself? To make matters worse, a dark god from her past, the eponymous God of Endings, who has stalked her down the years, seems to be drawing closer.
Yet for all it’s darkness, I didn’t find it a narrative filled with gratuitous violence, or with cynicism. I think this is because Anna never loses her essential decency—though there are times when she comes close.
____
While there’s no indication of a sequel to come, no cliffhanger ending—though it does end at a turning point in her un-life—it is clear there could be another book for this character, should the author feel inspired to write one. For one thing, there are those gaps, which might (or might not) be still explored, plus the years between 1984 and the present. And there is that turning point I just mentioned. Besides, it would be good to see more of Vadim, whose time on stage is as brief as his worldly knowledge is long.
Whether or not there is a sequel, I will be looking for more from the author of this intriguing, beautifully-written book.
This is an extraordinary book, which has received much praise.
It begins rather ominously: “When I was a child, the dead were all around us. Cemeteries were not common in the early years of the 1830s. Instead, small, shambling family graveyards butted up against barns, or sprung up like pale mushrooms at the edges of pastures, in the yards of church, and school, and meetinghouse—until eventually you could look out across the village, see all those gravestones like crooked teeth in a mouth, and wonder who the place really belonged to, the huddled and transient living or the persistent dead? Many folks found this proximity to death and its souvenirs discomfiting, but my father was the first gravestone carver in the village of Stratton, New York, which meant that the distillation of death and grief into beauty was our family business.”
As one might expect from this beginning, life and death, mortality and immortality, beauty in the form of natural beauty and in art, are among the themes of this story, expressed in many different ways.
It is the story of Collette LeSange, a Frenchwoman teaching fine arts to the children of upwardly mobile parents an upstate New York town in the year 1984. Except—and it is very big except—Ms. Collette, as the children call her, is not at all what she seems. Her real name is Anna, she was born in 1824 in a small American town (not far from where she lives now) . . . and she is a vampire. At the age of ten, she lost most of her family to a tuberculosis pandemic then sweeping New England. Her superstitious neighbors, convinced the disease was the result of dead people leaving their graves to feed on the blood of the living, applied the only cure they knew: to burn the dead and feed their ashes to their surviving relatives. In one of the most gruesome and heart-wrenching scenes we see Anna and her brother, already dying, forced to consume the ashes of their father.
But as we will learn, her neighbors knew as little about vampires as they did about TB. Neither do we, as it develops. Anna is resigned to die and join her loved ones, when her step-grandfather, Vadim Semonov, arrives and takes her away to live with himself and her grandmother—until one day, when her death becomes inevitable, he turns her into what he is himself: a vampire. “This world, my dear child, all if it right to the very end if there is to be an end, is a gift. But it’s a gift few are strong enough to receive. I made a judgment that you might be among those strong few . . . I thought you might find some use for the world, and it for you. But if not, my sincerest apologies for the miscalculation.”
As the weary decades pass, as there seems no way out for her, no way but to witness an endless cycle of man’s inhumanity to man, Anna regards herself as a monster, mourning the fact that she was given no choice in what she was to become. (Though as the previous sentence indicates, the most monstrous deeds she witnesses are performed by ordinary humans, through their wars, their prejudices, misogyny, and cruel superstitions.) Anna is no typical vampire, spending her nights stalking her victims. Except for one period in France when she hunts and kills invading German soldiers—but this is to protect the community where she has found a temporary home, not to indulge her appetite—for the most part she subsists on the blood of animals, and tries to do as little harm as she can, though in this she is not always successful.
If her long life teaches her anything, it is the fragility of happiness in a harsh world. In one of the brighter, but all-too-brief interludes, she meets a Jewish artist and naturalist living in the wilderness, who becomes her lover and teaches her to paint, thus fostering her enduring love of art. Yet it is in one of their most joyful moments that he is suddenly stricken down, as the lives of humans are also fragile.
The novel, all told from Anna’s first-person viewpoint, goes back and forth between 1984 and earlier eras, centering around episodes of sadness, joy, and terror, crossing the Atlantic among the desperately poor on an emigrant ship, living in Eastern Europe, France, and Egypt. However, there are gaps in the narrative, including the time between the end of WWII and the 1980s. As far as we know, she only meets three other vampires, her grandfather, his servant, and a boy about her own age. Otherwise, she lives among the short-lived vremenie (that is, mortal humans), largely ignorant of herself and her own kind. But we, the readers, see that she is not much like other literary vampires. She has no inherent powers of fascination; she is strong, but not super-hero strong. She can walk in the light of day. In fact, the sun doesn’t seem to bother her at all. In a moral sense, she longs to live in the light, but seems doomed too often to witness or experience darkness.
When we meet her in 1984 her hunger for blood is inexplicably growing, which presents a danger for the children she teaches, especially a sickly but exceptionally gifted boy named Leo. Leo comes from an abusive home. She knows it would be unwise to grow too close to the boy, but his talent calls to her, and it is difficult to figure out which of his parents is responsible for the abuse: his manipulative, drug-addicted mother, who tries to draw Anna/Colette in as a part-time babysitter, or his cold step-father. One of them is lying about the other, but how is she to know which one, and in the meantime, how can she best protect Leo—including protecting him from herself? To make matters worse, a dark god from her past, the eponymous God of Endings, who has stalked her down the years, seems to be drawing closer.
Yet for all it’s darkness, I didn’t find it a narrative filled with gratuitous violence, or with cynicism. I think this is because Anna never loses her essential decency—though there are times when she comes close.
____
While there’s no indication of a sequel to come, no cliffhanger ending—though it does end at a turning point in her un-life—it is clear there could be another book for this character, should the author feel inspired to write one. For one thing, there are those gaps, which might (or might not) be still explored, plus the years between 1984 and the present. And there is that turning point I just mentioned. Besides, it would be good to see more of Vadim, whose time on stage is as brief as his worldly knowledge is long.
Whether or not there is a sequel, I will be looking for more from the author of this intriguing, beautifully-written book.
