Review: My End Is My Beginning, Moris Farhi
By Luke Frostick
My End Is My Beginning is the last book by the legendary novelist, poet and human rights advocate Moris Farhi who passed away last year. It is a strange, beautiful and flawed work that aims really high and unfortunately doesn’t totally hit its target.
The novel is a piece of speculative fiction set in an unnamed country. Farhi builds an uncanny version of earth, where an eternal war is playing out between the Saviours and the Dolphinaros, one on the side of tyrannical God and the other fighting for an incarnation of mother earth. It is a world in which enlightened men and women reincarnate as leviathans to guide the next generation of idealistic young activists, and children receive messages from Hindu gods about the future of the world.
The book is narrated by Olric -possibly a reference to an imaginary character in Oğuz Atay’s epic Tutunamayanlar (The Disconnected). Olric lives in the unnamed country that has fallen under the sway of Numen, a secular military dictator in allegiance with a radical Islamic theocrat, an unholy and on-the-nose fusion of the Middle East’s twin breeds of dictator.
After the death of his wife Belkis, during a protest, Olric finds himself wracked by grief and guilt that he didn’t die by her side, but instead was dragged away by a malicious entity called Hidebehind. Grieving and burdened by survivor’s guilt, he reflects on his past as an international activist and joined by Belkis, -resurrected as a leviathan-, his wise beyond his years son and a reincarnated form of Hrant Dink, prepares to confront Hidebehind.
The novel is divided between the central narrative of Olric traveling around his country preparing for his confrontation and reflecting on his life. The former takes the form of a slow journey round his city evading the informers of the dictator, talking to friends and thinking. The latter are self-contained units of Olric and Belkis being sent by a leviathan-backed organisation into various human rights catastrophes round the world to try to prevent the suffering there and help those oppressed by dictatorial regimes’ cultures and religions.
They get airdropped into global hotspots such as China to gather evidence on the Uyghur cultural genocide and Saudi Arabia to rescue enslaved women as kind of special-forces activists. The characters also get involved in topics ranging from female genital -mutilation to discrimination against the Roma in Europe. It wasn’t particularly believable to me that that the best plan to fix the world that the immortal leviathans could apparently come up with was to throw ideological young lovers at global human rights violations. However, putting that to one side, the problem is that all the issues that the book raises are really important, but are not given the space they need to develop. Each issue that Olric and Belkis interact with is explored for a single chapter then dropped without having an opportunity to really dig into the nuances. What Farhi is trying to do with all of these individual segments is to paint a picture of an unjust of the world sliding into chaos but it is built at the expense of detail in any one global problem and does not have a huge impact or payoff within Olric's story.
There is also a slight but unfortunate feeling of white saviourisum in some of the segments, for example in the one about FGM, a Scandinavian lawyer character gets very close to that trope. This is alleviated to a large degree by the emphasis on the fact that the teams sent out by the leviathans are a mix of people from all nationalities, but once noticed, the savoiurisum stuck with me.
The other critique that can be made of the book is the nature of its world building. The great American fantasist Brandon Sanderson reaches for the metaphor of the iceberg when he talks about world building. His theory goes that when you are writing any fiction, particularly speculative, you have to give your world depth. The tip of the iceberg is what the reader can see on the page, but the writer should also evoke a deeper and much larger world that exists in the imagination. If you consider Orwell’s 1984, Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Emily St. John Mandel’s more contemporary Station Eleven -all works that imagine alternative or near-future versions of a dystopic earth- all of those books elude to a much greater world than you can see in the narrative. In My End Is My Beginning, much of those attempts of building a larger world than what the characters are describing to us are superficial. For example, in Farhi's version of the world, the Gezi park protest is not violently put down by Erdogan, but by a functionally identical fictional prime minister called Ustan Guc. Or the dictatorial young prince of Saudi Arabia carpet bombing Yemeni civilians is a man called prince Amyar, not Mohamed Bin Salman. This is not hinting at ice hidden beneath the water, it is shuffling names around.
There is some better mythology construction and lore surrounding the leviathans and the Dolphinaros and their war with the saviours, but the physical world and the fictional country the story takes place does not have have any great depth to it and that is disappointing.
This review is coming across quite negative and I should be clear that My End Is My Beginning has its positives, Olric’s coming to terms with his fate is compelling to watch and comes together in a strong ending. The writing style is excellent throughout with some really beautiful passages. Finally, though as I said above I have some problems with the way the world is constructed, the mythology that he creates and the strangeness of it grabbed my interest.
To conclude, I really wanted to like this novel more than I have ended up doing. It is not a straight-up bad book like 2048, but is a really ambitious work of fiction that takes commendable risks. Unfortunately, when a writer takes big risks with a novel, it doesn’t always pay off in the way that they intended. However, putting those concerns aside, the narrative kept me reading and Farhi’s book has a commitment to pluralism and humanism that can’t help but resonate with me. Moreover, his profound belief in the power of international activism and non-violent protest against the forces of authoritarian nationalism and theocratic totalitarianism is one that I really want to share in.
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