Rebecca Priestley and her lifelong friend Maz are on a roadtrip down the South Island’s West Coast. It’s 2021, in between nationwide Covid-19 lockdowns. The vaccine is about to be rolled out. The friends take the trip in an effort to enjoy themselves and be distracted from life crises. Priestley grapples with disillusionment with her job, being kept awake by thoughts of climate change and the ever-present threat of earthquakes. The road story is interspersed with episodes from their past when both were born-again Christians waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus, or nuclear devastation.
Priestley is a professor of science in society at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. End Times is a follow-up of sorts to the personal narrative of her critically acclaimed Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica from four years ago. The science communicator has turned further inwards in a work of empathy to try to understand people’s beliefs, especially when those beliefs fly in the face of scientific evidence.
Priestley reveals the gulf of belief between her and the people she talks to along the coast about the impact of climate change. What emerges is a sense of opposing views and binaries: city versus province, practical-minded and academic, personal observation of a landscape versus scientific evaluation. What forms the backdrop to these conversations are the reflections on her teenage years when she was forming her own values.
Her experience of being a born-again Christian offered some hope and purpose among the Thatcherism, apartheid and nuclear-arms race of the 1980s. It was also an example of how she was swept up in dogma but eventually saw the light of the unbeliever. Priestley and Maz were also punks. Initially, this seems like a contradiction in belief, but it offers avenues of salvation out of crisis, also expressing hope and the need to disrupt the status quo.
Among the discussion of the anxieties of our age is a heartfelt story about friendship. From the intensity of teenage beliefs through to the tribulations of family, relationship break-ups and career highs and lows. There is humour, too. When a local offers them a visit to some glow-worm caves, he first points out “a dark bush sparkling with lights. Then we realise it’s a string of fairy lights woven through someone’s hedge.” A Coaster having the city slickers on is a pleasant contrast to the conversations about coal and climate change Priestley has with others.
Her prose is reflective and at times deeply personal. While also showing readers how many ways there are to look at land and rock, and to see how the earth will rupture during a quake along the Alpine Fault, she illustrates her anxiety about the lack of climate action. It feels very much a book of the now – the “end times” of the 1980s a juxtaposition to the existential crisis of the 2020s. It’s an empathetic look at what others believe when those views oppose your own, and how empathy could be the first step in bridging those divides. And about how personal beliefs deeply affect our communities, our country and the planet.
