Drowning the Sharks

It begins with a dark and murderous birth, a chaotic infancy in a decrepit stately home. Everything outside teeters on the brink of collapse.

John Ezekiel – little, benighted John Ezekiel – is born into a world he is unable to comprehend.

These are the days of the Tenebrae. It is the time of the Great Dying. Scientists, those humourless anti-romantics, call it the Holocene Extinction Event; prissy ecologists call it the Neo-Malthusian Crisis; Dispensationalists call it the Tribulation. Everybody else calls it the Great Dying.

And so it is.

The Tenebrae vents from beneath the earth without apparent reason or warning. It is invisible and odourless – some species of cytotoxic gas, so they say. First it drives you insane, then you go blind, and then a long time after that, you die. There is a thickening wreath of it around the equator; the wind systems of the northern and southern hemispheres are diffusing it slowly across the surface of the planet. Within thirty years, all human life will surely be expunged.

As far as John is concerned, the Tenebrae makes a nonsense of all human endeavour; it makes a nonsense of all decency, and honesty, and moral law.

And as society begins to buckle, the old rules slowly disappear. The country lurches hopelessly towards civil war. And John Ezekiel – devoutly cynical, painfully estranged, and adrift in a world which is rapidly haemorrhaging purpose – attempts to make some sort of sense of it all. He grows increasingly horrified at the absurdity of existence; we follow his disastrous experiments with love and sex, his agonising search for his lost father, his long-dead mother, and his increasingly desperate attempts to reconcile himself to his own pitifully abbreviated life.

And then, as the earth exhales, and reality begins to break down, poor John Ezekiel – lost in the dreamlike terror of the apocalypse – realizes that the world is even more mysterious than he imagined, and that he himself is the puzzle which must somehow be unravelled.