Set on an inhospitable future earth, Maria Takolander’s The End of Romance is a violent dystopia – and it’s relatable.Life is hard here. Humanity clusters in degraded urban settlements, scrounging off what’s left of the old world. The planet’s sick of us, has been made sick by us. Nothing grows except cacti and the air is poisoned by a fog that behaves, sometimes, like it might be sentient. The only hope for survival is a distant planet known as the Promised Land. An interstellar colonial war is being waged to claim it, every healthy boy forcibly recruited to its cause.The End of Romance – Maria Takolander (Text Publishing)The woman (named Marianna – but names are rare in this book) lives with her son at the edge of town. Taught how to survive by the Captain, one of her mother’s terrible men, the woman is self-reliant and implacable. She has grown up in a world where violence is the norm and death is something you see every day. The only chink in her armour is her son, old enough to have started military school, but not yet sent away. She knows it’s only a matter of time.One day, while scavenging, the woman encounters a man, Josif. Young, healthy, he seems to have escaped his fate. Desperate to save her son, the woman demands he take them to the monastery where he was raised, where the boy can be safe. This place of sanctuary, it turns out, just might cost them everything.Four views of the same futureThe End of Romance is told in four sections. Each offers a different perspective on the future and is written in its own unique style, demonstrating Takolander’s range and depth. Book One belongs to Marianna. Her point of view is matter of fact, unemotional and lacks introspection. Takolander’s writing is bare-boned here, though moments of beauty still shine. This style distances us from the events but also from Marianna herself. We do not feel her pain when she is injured. In fact, it’s not clear that she feels it. This is a woman disconnected from her surroundings, from community and, in a lot of ways, from herself.Book Two takes a sharp turn into the past. It is a transcript of the final transmission from a woman named Eeva, one of the first explorers sent in search of the Promised Land, with co-pilot Adan. Ironically, given the distance in space and time, it’s a deeply personal account, told in a voice that’s the polar opposite of Marianna’s: rich with physicality and self-awareness. Book Three is Josif’s. Where Marianna is primal, all survival and instinct, he is what’s left of civilisation. Articulate and introspective, but also whiny and entitled, Josif believes he is owed access to women’s attention and bodies. He sulks when he doesn’t get it. Uncomfortable with silence, he fills it with facts from his education, but has none of the skills Marianna uses to keep them alive.Book Four is a mirror to Eeva’s, written by Marianna’s son, in the “Gospels for Young Readers Journaling Edition”. Loose in structure, but vividly descriptive, the boy’s section is a rush of tangible, sensory detail and meandering thoughts. More present in his environment than Marianna, more insightful than Josif, the boy ends the book on a note that might be hopeful.That is, if he’s allowed to survive, rather than being cast into the meatgrinder with the rest of his generation.Heavy handed religious referencesThe End of Romance is so thick with religious references and imagery, it can feel heavy handed at times. Eeva, Adan and the Promised Land are almost too much. Josif tells Marianna that women aren’t sent to the Promised Land because Eeva was so unreliable. It’s her fault, then, that all men must suffer and die. The novel’s disasters of cacti and poisonous fog are closer to biblical plagues than to environmental degradation. However, the constant intrusions of the modern – from people scrolling on phones to abandoned shipping containers – pin this parabolic future to the here and now, making it feel possible rather than symbolic.The novel is also deeply concerned with gendered violence, masculinity and motherhood. Some women disfigure their sons so they will not be conscripted. Teenage boys prey on girls with impunity. This is a world full of grieving mothers, but no fathers; it is a world where boys are prized and privileged, then sent away to die. The same as it ever wasIn The End of Romance, Takolander has created a future that continues cycles of violence we know all too well: environmental, domestic, military, colonial. No post-apocalyptic zombie hordes or leather-clad barbarians inhabit these rundown streets. Its horrors are mundane, everyday – and terrible in their familiarity.Which sounds depressing, I know. This book has some pretty tough moments in it. Its four perspectives shine an incisive and unflinching light on the nature of being human and the insidious power of mythmaking. But at its core, it is the story of a woman trying to protect her child. Sadly, the odds are not in their favour. The End of Romance offers no happy ending. But I, like the boy, refuse to believe that “all the magic of the world” is ruined. Together, we choose hope.Joanne Anderton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.