End Times - A review
Bronwyn Rideout - 2 April 2024
Author: Rebecca Priestley
Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press
ISBN: 9781776921188
Date published: 12 October 2023
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
RRP: $35.00
“In the late 1980s, two teenage girls found refuge from a world of cosy conformity, sexism, and the nuclear arms race in protest and punk. Then, drawn in by a promise of meaning and purpose they cast off their punk outfits and became born-again Christians. Unsure which fate would come first - nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus - they sought answers from end-times evangelists, scrutinising friends and family for signs of demon possession and identifying EFTPOS and barcodes as signs of a looming apocalypse.
Fast forward to 2021, and Rebecca and Maz - now a science historian and an engineer - are on a road trip to the West Coast. Their journey, though full of laughter and conversation and hot pies, is haunted by the threats of climate change, conspiracy theories, and a massive overdue earthquake”
- Inside blurb
End Times is a non-fiction memoir written by Dr Rebecca Priestley of Victoria University of Wellington’s Science in Society programme. Priestley sets herself the unenviable task of balancing the 2021 Covid travelogue and the 80s/90s Youth Group post-mortem. While this occurs structurally as alternating chapters there is an emotional and linguistic richness to the travelogue lacking in the post-mortem. Priestley’s science background is given a place to shine as she and Maz visit landmarks along the South Island’s West Coast but is often interrupted by detours into Priestley’s family history in that region. While it may give a rationale as to why the two friends visit a settlement, it creates a third storyline that doesn’t enhance the existing ones.
My issues with the 80s/90s timeline are largely due to my disappointment. I am inclined to religious and spiritual topics for sure but I found the inside blurb oversold the outrageousness of Priestley’s coming-of-age story. There is far more fretting about boys and fitting in with other young Christians than about demons. But I always felt I was stumbling into a glass wall with this half of the story. There are hints of a Kiwi-style, Family Ties plot between the teenaged Maz and Rebecca and their own mothers, who are friends in their own right: Liberal, open-minded mothers and their children who rebel by becoming conservative Christians in the Hutt Valley. I cannot hold it against Priestley for possibly feeling cringe about her past beliefs but there is a clinical detachment here which belies as part that she might not be ready to fully excavate.
Amidst a past and present full of predicted calamities, the very real pandemic looms over the book. Priestley doesn’t shy from it but is reserved about broaching it during her travels. She and her family were prepared and exited COVID unscathed. But it does give a tenuous link between the two narratives. Churches that preached about the end times in the 80s and preached about the mandates now are distracting from the real problems of the world, which is the lack of action on climate change. It’s a sour note to reach just short of the halfway point of a memoir and possibly both storylines would have been better served by being separate books in their own right.
A good purchase for the geologist, engineer, or seismologist in your life and a very good buy if they also had a Christian youth group past.