Endling is an extraordinary novel that mixes fiction and reality. It begins by taking one narrative path and then it strays entirely, morphing into another story, appropriating the novel-that-might-have-been and transforming it, as events in the real world make it impossible for the author to continue with her original intention, unaltered.

Endling is set in Ukraine 2022. It begins as a satirical take on the marriage/romance tour industry, until that plot is usurped by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the aftermath of that. In between is the author’s own story. Born in Ukraine, Maria Reva now lives in Canada, but she and her sister, Anna Pidgorna, felt compelled to try to reach their grandfather, living in Kherson, as the war continued. They made it as far as Kharkiv before they had to turn back. Their story slips into the narrative, creating a metanarrative in which fiction and reality overlap, as Maria Reva and her fictional counterpart, Maria, or Masha, a wedding tour company founder, send her characters on a mission to rescue Masha’s grandfather from the zone of conflict.

‘Endling’ is a peculiar word that denotes a creature that is the last of its species. At some point in the past there was a last Dodo, a last Tasmanian Tiger, and a myriad of other animals, plants and insects that have been the last of their line. It’s easy to see the wider implications of the term in this novel. First, Ukraine, its people and culture are under threat. But the term ‘endling’ is most immediately applicable to Lefty’s possible fate. Lefty is a snail with a shell that spirals to the left rather than the right. It’s a rare trait that makes him unsuitable for breeding with other snails of his species – even if such a snail could be found – except if that rare snail possessed the same physical anomaly. Yeva (easy to confuse with the author’s last name) is a malacologist who specialises in locating rare snails and attempting to breed and study them. She works in Ukraine out of her mobile laboratory that took two years to fund. Ukraine is not part of the EU, which made acquiring funds from European NGOs difficult. So, Yeva makes up the shortfall by participating in romance tours hosted for foreign men who come to Ukraine on trips organised by ‘Romeo Meets Yulia’, the dating and matchmaking company founded by Maria/Masha. They come hoping to land a subservient Ukrainian wife, or sex, or both. For her part, Yeva is not interested in a relationship. Her mother worries she might be a lesbian, or that she might leave things too late. But Yeva is, herself, an endling. She does not enjoy sex. She has no desire for either men or women. Snails and their study are her entire world.

Maria Reva has stated that her intention when she began writing Endling was to expose the marriage industry in Ukraine: meaning companies that hook up Ukrainian women with foreign men who come with preconceived notions of what Ukrainian femininity is; compliant and quiet. According to information on the fictitious ‘Romeo Meets Yulia’ website, “the Slavic Female enjoys more estrogen in the blood. She can’t help love being female and show off being female, unlike Western counterpart, who actually wants to be male. Western Frankenmonster still expects males to be chivalrous in return.” Maria Reva, Ukrainian born but living in Canada, has often told the story while promoting this book, of her sister, Anna Pidgorna, a composer who was travelling to Princeton for her PhD, speaking to a man she was travelling next to and revealing she was of Ukrainian origin. The man replied, “Oh, I would love to have a Ukrainian girl as a wife because American women are too ambitious and aggressive.”

At least, Maria Reva has revealed, that was one inspiration for the novel. Yeva is immersed in her life studying snails and making money from the marriage tours when Nastia (Anastasia) approaches her with a plan to kidnap the ‘bachelors’ – the word used for the male tourists hoping to meet women – so as to expose the industry and, Nastia hopes, gain the attention (and approval) of her mother, Iolanta. Iolanta has been missing for eight months after an argument with Nastia. She is a former activist for Komod, a group that has protested against the industry in the past and gained national and international notoriety for the use of their naked bodies to make their point. But Nastia can’t drive and she needs a large vehicle like Yeva’s mobile lab to keep the bachelors imprisoned long enough to carry out her plan. For her part, Yeva’s snail population has dwindled to one snail, she is depressed and suicidal and so, why not?

Without the Russian invasion in February 2022, this would have been the novel’s trajectory. It is an interesting enough premise, and the scope for comic writing is certainly evident. Reva’s initial intention is to undermine common attitudes, like the stereotype of submissive Slavic women. She also takes a swipe at conservation priorities. Yeva, considers the difficulty of funding malacology:

Snails weren’t pandas – those oversize bumbling toddlers that sucked up national conservation budgets – or any of the other charismatic megafauna, like orcas or gorillas. Snails weren’t huggy koala bears, which in reality were vicious and riddled with chlamydia. Nor were snails otters, which looked like plush toys made for mascots by aquariums, despite the fact that they lured dogs from beaches to drown and rape them.

Likewise, the premise of the plot – the kidnapping – deliberately undermines the submissive stereotypes nurtured by the ‘bachelors’ who travel to Ukraine. This is elevated to the level of absurdity as the Russian advance progresses: “Thirteen grown men! Well-educated men! Kidnapped! By three girls in animal masks! In a war!” With a squint there is something approaching a Carry On film in all this, as though the war, itself, becomes an absurd but hyperbolic representation of the invasion undertaken by the bachelors, and vice versa.

But just as snails are given status and Slavic women turn out to be something more than submissive stereotypes, masculinity is also deconstructed and emasculated. We see that the women’s captives are mostly docile and compliant. In a feminist reimagining of gender tropes we are told, “Hands joined, tears flowed. A deep understanding descended upon the circle of men . . . They’d been rattling its white-hot prison bars, waiting for a damsel to come along and save them. None would. Not the women back home, not the women here or elsewhere.” I’ve deliberately truncated the quote to avoid spoiling the insight these men have together. The point is that they must face their own insights taken from their situation, even though they may seem to us equally absurd. For the reader, the masculine prerogatives that undergird aggression and chauvinism are shown to be illusory when men are placed within the traditional paradigms of female protagonists.

It’s really not possible to review this book without discussing the rupture in the story caused by the advent of the war about a third of the way into the novel. I will leave any plot points beyond that moment to the imagination of the reader, or better still, to a reading of Endling. But this rupture is one of the most interesting and startling things about the novel. Suddenly, as Yeva, Nastia and Sol (Nastia’s sister) are driving, they hear distant bangs. Is it a car accident? Fireworks? The narrative then restarts as a first-person recount by Maria Reva, herself, with self-reflexive nods to her previous book of short stories, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, including the reproduction of a sketch of a collapsing apartment building from that book. There is an exchange of ever-shortening letters between Reva and a publisher as she tries to defend the use of humour in an essay to understand the war, and even a submission letter for funds to return to Ukraine to make a study of the situation, as well as attempt to bring her grandfather to safety.

And then the story is wrapped up in a most perfunctory and unsatisfactory ending, as if to demonstrate the inadequacy of traditional narrative for her purposes. The usual pages of acknowledgements follow, even a hilarious page about the typesetting of the book, before the narrative stumbles back into life. The whole thing is messy, chaotic, and the details are sometimes even contradictory as the direction of the old story is abandoned, and Maria Reva’s own story melds with elements of the fictional plot. It’s like seeing the author’s panic on the page as she wonders how to resolve the events in the real world with her own story: like watching her break it apart and try to reconstruct what she is doing on the page as you read. It remains a feature of the novel from that point forward, and its honesty stands in stark contrast to the surreal nature of the war itself, and the attempts of Russian authorities to turn the war into a sanitised account of pioneering settlers and the ‘de-Nazification’ of Ukraine with their propaganda.

And that is a part of the point of Reva’s metanarrative, I think. If you think of ‘metanarrative’ it is like Coyote running off a cliff. Sometimes what is humorous or worthy of our attention arises from a disconnect between reality and perception. Like that moment when Coyote runs off the cliff but gravity seems powerless to plunge him into the abyss: at least, not until he is aware of his predicament. That’s what I mean about reality and perception: what I also mean about narrative and metanarrative. Up until that moment of realisation there is a different story happening in Coyote’s head. He never started his morning anticipating that his latest ACME invention is bound to betray him. Instead, this was finally going to be the day that he bagged Roadrunner. And that’s the narrative that is driving him manically forward until that moment when a different reality intrudes – let’s call it the universe’s metanarrative featuring gravity, long falls and hard rocks – and down he goes.

Maria Reva’s metanarrative is a more honest approach than the fabricated narrative of Russian propaganda, and her authorial struggle stands in contrast to the passivity of the male captives who tell each other stories to reassure themselves that the war is not really happening. For the women, violence must be confronted as a reality. Violence is penetrative, like the invasion of bachelors or soldiers, like the wounding from a bullet: it is the sexual dart of a snail during sex or the piercing proboscises of thousands of mosquitos Yeva believes robbed her of sexual desire the first time she had sex in a swamp (yes, really!) Violence on the scale of an invasion separates your intended course of life from the broader narrative impulse that threatens to consume it.

That such a messy and chaotic process actually contributes to our understanding of the rupture of war and the personal impact it has, rather than spiralling the story out of control, is a testament to Maria Reva’s skill and vision. The last two thirds of the novel are worthy of this bold move. The story of the kidnapped bachelors and a quest to find love for a rare snail seems like a mad narrative combination, and what follows after that becomes even more surreal as Yeva and her companions embark on a quixotic mission to save a snail or a grandfather, or possibly neither. This is real virtuoso writing, and I can’t recommend enough that you read it; that you discover the book, yourself. It’s what Lefty would want!