The End of the End of the Earth: Essays

Jonathan Franzen

4th Estate, £16.99

Review by Alasdair McKillop

In his new essay collection, Jonathan Franzen almost wins a game of Julia Donaldson bingo. Travelling through east Africa on safari, he sees a lappet-faced vulture, a hyena and a marabou stork.

If only he had spotted a wildebeest and a warthog, he would’ve collected the entire cast of Donaldson’s recent book The Ugly Five. Alas, no stuffed Gruffalo prize for Jonathan but he probably didn’t know he was playing in the first place.

The End of the End of the Earth is mainly a book about birds so let’s start at the top of the tree and work down to the root of its problems: the title is silly.

It’s clearly meant to be one of those smart-if-you-think-about-it titles that someone smart should have thought about before it was put on the front of the book. The piece the title is taken from, it should be said, is the best in the book. Part trip to Antarctica, part bracingly honest family history, it is entirely well put together and effective.

But this is an uneven collection. Despite the boldly stated subtitle, it’s debateable whether most of the pieces really qualify as essays. Some of them run to only two or three pages. The long ones, all on birds, read more like reports and they lack the strong voice so crucial to essay writing. What is distinctive about them as reports is in fact their length and I had the uncharitable thought that this was a luxury granted to Franzen the famous novelist when many other reporters, denied the same assignments, could have done the job with equal proficiency.

Despite this unhappy suspicion, Franzen the reporter is quite likeable, and he knows how to find the right level: not so deep that he loses the general reader but not so shallow that we doubt his credentials as a reliable guide to the subject. His ability to tell a story is obvious and he has a keen eye not only for plumage but for the sort of details that bring a piece to life, as when he notes that hunters in provincial Albanian villages have recordings of bird calls on their phones.

I started to imagine him as a boy in small town America looking up at the sky while the other boys chased a ball somewhere else.

In an anomalous but insightful piece about Edith Wharton, Franzen writes: “Apparently all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire…and I, as a reader, become hopeless not to make that desire my own.”

In this collection, Franzen the reporter is the character with the powerful desire and we, the readers, are happy to find it all very appealing.

But Franzen the cub reporter with the heart of gold and the dream that came true shares the space with Franzen the literary heavy-breather. His attempts to add Deep Meaning often come down like a thick smog around the simpler pleasures in this book: “I began to see the herds of herbivores as inhabitants of something resembling an intact ecosystem, to mentally place them within a historical continuum at whose earlier end they’d roamed freely all over the continent; and thus to connect, at least a little, with their amazingness.”

When you overshoot portentous, you’re liable to land in facile and that’s exactly where Franzen lands on a dispiriting number of occasions. Other times, he willingly chooses to go the long way through the thicket rather than take the shortcut along the nicely trimmed path: “If, as we are told, the point of exotic travel is to ‘create memories,’ and if, as I would insist, our memories consist fundamentally of good stories, and if what makes a story good is some element of unexpectedness, it follows that the point of travelling is to be surprised.” That’s enough to make you stay at home and draw the curtains.

It’s hard to tell when Franzen is trying to be funny. I don’t think he tries very often and that’s a big part of the problem. Readers have to be attuned to habits and moods, particularly for those moments when a shared understanding is vital. Take the following: “Totalitarianism destroyed the fabric of Albanian society and tradition, and yet this was not a bad time for birds.”

That’s a line that has to be played for laughs, otherwise it’s awful.

Some of the writing is more obviously bad. In the space of a few moments, Franzen can go from likening birds flying in single file to “an endless coal train in Montana” – nice – to describing a buffalo as having an expression “as badass as a Navy SEAL’s” – not so nice.

Then there are lines of the sort you’re liable to write if you’ve spent too much time reading articles in The Guardian: “The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value”.

And maybe he has. Franzen is a liberal even if his liberalism is like a bad night’s sleep – something he tosses and turns his way through.

He makes useful points – or points I agree with anyway – about focusing on global challenges such as climate change at the expense of achievable conservation projects in the places where people live.

He loves the environment, but not necessarily environmentalism at its most strident and unthinking. “I’ve long been struck by the spiritual kinship of environmentalism and New England Puritanism,” he writes. “Both belief systems are haunted by the feeling that simply to be human is to be guilty.”

Interrogating something is a mark of taking it seriously, so it’s disappointing when Franzen sacrifices his liberalism for cheap literary effect. An almost impossible task can be like almost anything you can imagine, it doesn’t have to be “like defending mansions in a ghetto”.

This is a collection with good and bad qualities that have a way of neutralising each other. That means its effect will last no longer than the robin on the windowsill.