Block buster
Adead body in the lift shaft is the elephant in the room in Eva Dolan’s complex, brilliant thriller of murder and property development. Castle Rise apartment block is due to be demolished so that expensive flats can be built and sold to overseas investors. The payout to leave isn’t nearly enough for the tenants to buy again in London. Castle Rise is plagued by junkies and squatters and the constant threat of bulldozers. And the lift shaft is starting to smell.
The narration is shared by two voices. Ella, a rising princess of social media activism, is instagramming her way to political stardom protesting the “economic cleansing” of gentrification. Molly, a documentary photographer and old-school veteran of civil disobedience, has accepted Ella as a protege — a younger, fresher version of herself.
Molly’s compassion and doubt is woven into her commitment to the cause; she understands the terrible anxiety interlaced with poverty. A tenant of Castle Rise, her options are to leave her life and start over at 60 in a strange town or rent until the money runs out and then throw herself in front of a Tube train. Ella was born rich and Daddy still pays her rent. Although her passion for protest was fuelled by a nasty brush with police, she’s new to the disorienting power of fear. Molly doesn’t know if she can trust Ella when the panic sets in.
Jumping backwards and forwards in time, Ella and Molly’s pasts are gradually revealed. This disjointed chronology is sometimes disruptive but provides escalating tension that culminates in a genuinely shocking finale.
It’s incredibly well-observed, with an eye for specific detail that plunges the reader viscerally into a scene, whether it be a sip of warm Coke at a protest or a vicious murder. This Is How
It Ends is something of a compressed epic, offering sensitive and perceptive insight into poverty, age, activism and sexual politics.
Many things move inexorably towards their ends: the dream of effective protest, the unification of the Left, the lives of the poor, trust, love but more specifically the reckless and desperate path of a murderer.