The world is coming to an end. In a period known as The After, on a coastal area called The Spit, Ava and Anna are waiting for The Wave. Ava, a young woman who sells sex in the woods, is obsessed with Anna: older, wealthier, an influencer and kept wife who has recently lost her daughter Ada to anorexia. Both Anna and Ava are disaffected, distanced from their broken environment and from themselves. Anna makes regular visits to an unspecified location where she asks people to beat her up “just to check I could still feel”.
The Last Days, Ali Millar’s memoir of the painful process of leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was published in 2022. Ava Anna Ada is her first novel, set in the runup to an extreme weather event which could be catastrophe or “Rapture”. The story is told in short chapters which switch and merge perspectives so the way we see things shifts. It’s cleverly unstable, offering and then taking away our sense of sympathy for the two women and the choices they perceive.
Some of the book’s ingredients will be familiar to readers of millennial fiction or cli-fi. As well as the disaffected woman who likes to be beaten, there is some comfortable satire of maternal ambivalence and lifestyle culture (we know that Anna needs help when we see that she owns organised rows of Kilner jars). There’s an amplified version of the climate crisis, backed by a malign world order that is represented by generic unseen institutions such as the “Sorting Centre” and “The Screen”.
These are popular subjects – I can think of several recently published novels featuring each – but what Ava Anna Ada brings to them is intensity. It’s a bleeding, sweating story compelled by sexualised violence, consumption and decay. The plot is tensely pitched from the outset, with Anna mid-breakdown, her surgeon husband Leo complicit in a cover-up that involves butchering his patients, Ava plotting a desperate escape from The Spit, and the seismic wave on its way. It escalates from there through refrains of animal torture, BDSM, child abuse, narcotics addiction, a mother’s graphic fantasies of murdering her newborn, humanitarian crisis and ecological catastrophe.
What is strange about the book is that much of this is curiously distanced – it’s often almost coy. The story’s interest doesn’t lie in discovering what happens at the Sorting Centre or under Leo’s scalpel, and we never really go there. On the page, there’s a habit of euphemism: “getting smaller” as reference to anorexia; “beyond the bounds of his own body” rather than dead. A scene in which a child is beaten is recounted evasively, largely via pretty references to patterns of “feathery” bruises. In a pivotal chapter, I think Ava and Anna have sex, but perhaps it’s deeper than that: “we made holes of each other and into each other”; “it felt more like a holy communion than anything else”.
This circumlocution makes it difficult for the reader to follow what is happening at critical moments. It leaves the impression that the book lacks faith in its own authority on its fraught themes. Other recent versions of this tale have fewer or quieter concerns, but permit themselves more insight. Jessie Greengrass’s The High House (flooded British coastline) is chilling and memorable, in part because its story is calm: in an isolated house, at the end of humanity, a handful of quite boring people are growing potatoes. Samuel Fisher’s Wivenhoe (freezing British coastline) focuses on a working-class young man who, at a time of murderous social and environmental breakdown, is happy about his girlfriend’s pregnancy and really kind to his mum. This is thought-provoking – it feels unexpected.
Ava Anna Ada (sweltering British coastline) foregrounds minor horrors: extended or repeated descriptions of peeling scabs and moths with their wings torn off. These are apparent substitutes and metaphors for the larger sexualised or plausibly even systemic violence that never shows its face. Perhaps that’s realistic, a reflection of how systemic violence quietly carries on. In this hyper-heated and ultra-violent setting, though, Millar’s delicate imagery can’t convey the force that seems to be desired.
• Ava Anna Ada by Ali Millar is published by White Rabbit (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
