Two fifty-something women going on a road trip to engage with their ancestry, their past, home-baked pies – and to visit the “coal face” of today’s biggest existential threat: global warming. Rebecca Preistley is “a writer and academic who writes about climate change”, her life-long friend is Maz (Marianne Rogers) a civil engineer, once a mining engineer. End Times is a work of autofiction, and is sad, funny, scary, and educational.

Maz is the extrovert of the pair, and more laid back about the world racing to environmental collapse – or, as they are on the West Coast of the South Island, the chances of their being engulfed in a crevasse, buried under liquefaction, or drowned by a tsunami – all resulting from a long expected catastrophic movement of the Alpine Fault. Preistley is the narrator, an introvert and less sanguine – alarmed to hear the fault runs through the Franz Josef Mobil station, the closest they get to ground zero if a quake were to happen.

End Times alternates between narratives of the road trip and memories of the women’s shared past (they’ve been friends since toddlers) – especially their once earnest commitment to evangelical Christianity: “Now that we were baptised Christians, our mothers persecuted us even more. They would burst into – ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’ – followed by a cackling laugh. Sometimes we wondered if they were demon-possessed.” The saddest part of the book for me was the description of the heartbreak of losing living faith.

The women grew up at a time “when we didn’t know which would come first – nuclear annihilation or the Second Coming of Jesus”, but Preistley now contemplates “global warming, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, all of which are scarier than stories about lakes of fire and pitchfork-wielding devils”.

End Times is about where anxiety comes from, and what it is that makes people motivated to do something, not only something to alleviate the anxiety, but something to ameliorate its causes. Preistley finds her youthful angst returning in today’s time of global pandemics, the rise of conspiracy theories and related dissemination of disinformation, and the seeming intractability of patriarchal power structures and the subjugation of women: “Lately, it feels as though the End Times have arrived.”

Given the fields of expertise of the two women, the reader learns of the history and geology of the magnificent West Coast as they travel: the Natural Flames near Murchison, the structures of the Ōpārara Valley, and the over-long-periods-of-time sculpting of the southern terrain by glacial flow. And there a wonderful moment in front of walls of glow worms: “That’s why I do this kind of shit, I remind myself. It’s almost always worth following a trail, saying yes to an adventure, for what you might find at the end, and people are mostly good and kind and fun.”

Offsetting the precision of the scientific information is the funny yet terrifying interview Preistley has with the (then) Westland Mayor, Bruce Smith – who offers lived experience as a counter to scientific research on several topics. The author comments about needing to balance researched knowledge with continuing openness to new information, so as not to fall into rigidity. Yet she points out the dangers of just accepting that some people have, and act on, beliefs that are endangering all life on the planet. She and Maz consider the incredibly hard lives of their female forebears, compared with the comforts they themselves enjoy – but also the threats that are facing them and their descendants, of which the colonists would have been unaware.

The book does not present answers and attempts even-handedness: “Responding fairly to climate change, though, will mean that those of us with plenty might need to learn to live with less, and sometimes that’s the hardest sell.”

End Times is a great depiction of a slice of time from the viewpoint of one human – the fun, the craziness, the sadness, the triumphs – and how you unravel a bit on a long road trip. I really enjoyed (if that’s an appropriate word in the face of environmental collapse!) this book.