Not The End of The World

Just imagine all that water.

Picture it rushing past, uprooting trees and rising to hide the mountains. Imagine your family's home and everything in it swept away by the powerful current. Imagine how you would feel if your whole world was turned upside down—literally—by a flood so big it covers the earth.

Imagine is what young adult author Geraldine McCaughrean does in her richly inventive novel, Not the End of the World, a bold and gritty retelling of the story of Noah's Ark.

It was Noah's faith in God that put his family there, alone and aloft on a water-logged world. He believed they survived the flood because, in their holiness, they were chosen to, safe in their ship after the rest of the rabble were washed away by an angry, let-down God.

But McCaughrean is less interested in old Noah than in those close to him. This is the story of the ark in all its heaving, filthy chaos—a far cry from cartoon images of cuddly creatures on a little wooden boat—from the perspective of his wife, his sons and their wives, and even some of the animals. (No two-by-two business here: Noah's sons packed in as many smelly beasts as they could fit, snout to rump.)

Mostly, though, this story belongs to Timna, Noah's 13-year-old daughter. She's an interesting choice. As Timna herself tells us, "A daughter is not like a son, after all. A daughter's name is not even worthy of mention when a man's descendants are named. ‘Shem, Ham and Japheth, sons of Noah.' They are the only ones who will be famous a thousand years from now." All the better for McCaughrean to imagine what it would have been like for a girl on the cusp of adulthood to ponder a future with no people in it besides her bizarre little family.

Turns out it's not as different as they might have hoped. The ship soon explodes into a microcosm of the sinful world, complete with deceit, lust, rage, and a self-righteousness that finds its expression in a hysterical religiosity. Timna's smug sister-in-law is glad to see their gossiping neighbors get the ax; her angry brother Shem is scaring them all with his violent version of his father's faith. As for Noah, his black-and-white ideas about right and wrong make it easy for him to build the ark, but awfully hard for his family to live on it. McCaughrean's human rendering of them all yanks the story from the weird world of Old Testament dudes who live to be 800 years old and gives it a language our modern minds can really hear. "Strange," Timna thinks. "It's the last thing you'd expect to feel, all squashed up in this place. Lonely."

The poor animals below deck, deprived of their animal nature—and their fields, woods, air, sea—are miserable, too. And talk about being stuck: As far as the eye can see there's nothing but rain and floodwater, an empty planet McCaughrean conjures with visceral, disturbing images. The clouds pile up "like dead mutton at the feet of a slaughter man" and the treacherous water swirling around the ship is "the shining surface tension that is all that parts breathing from drowning, the Living from the Dead."

At her most thrillingly subversive, McCaughrean makes the ark out to be a kind of floating cult. When Timna claims to be possessed by a demon to divert attention from a stowaway she's been hiding, her brother's immediate response is to kill her. She escapes his wrath because of her mother's rebellious love—Ama is willing to defy Noah even as she worries this might be synonymous with defying God. Think of this book as A People's History of the Ancient World: While the men crash around and make pronouncements, the women and children assume a more quiet place, their ears and eyes open. From their vantage point come some frightening questions: What if their family wasn't more deserving of survival than any other? What if their refusal to take their neighbors aboard had been a terrible mistake? What if Noah was wrong?

Ultimately, McCaughrean's version of the old story is a deeply faithful one. Through all the confusion and sadness, love rules, and eventually the sun peeks out from behind the clouds. We're left with a message that's more zen than dogmatic: Even the end of the world, as McCaughrean would have it, is not the end of the world. It might just be a matter of holding tight till the rain stops.