In many ways it feels like there are even fewer reasons to be hopeful now, as the film’s setting seems less of a dystopian future and more of a contemporary story about the times we live in, with the Britain again ravaged by floodsThe climate crisis is becoming more urgent, while political solutions are inadequate and compromised by a profit-driven economy. I have often felt that the time since the birth of my children can only be characterized by an increasing sense of despair in relation to the climate, cumulative disappointments that seem to point exclusively to catastrophe.
But as I watched the film, I was drawn again to the love it portrays, how this love emerges from the flood waters, damaged like the city, but still alive and still powerful. One of the most hopeful images in the film is of two mothers supporting and protecting each other, stronger through their friendship, singing as they walk through a rain-soaked landscape. I was struck again by the thought that hope is not the same as optimism; it is not based on facts or predictions. It comes from a refusal to give up, just as the nameless heroine of the book and the movie can never give up, always having to fight to survive, for herself, her son, for everyone she loves.
It doesn’t seem to me that this is a passive form of hope, a desire for the best while sitting back and doing nothing. It is a hope based on love itself, on what love drives us to do. Whether it is for our children, our parents, our friends, love compels us to want a better future. And crucially, this future depends on our care extending beyond those we are related to: it must go beyond self-interest, even beyond our personal ties – like that stranger who showed me kindness in the park – to a habitable, more equal life. world for everyone. I have long been convinced that hope can broaden our outlook. Although in some sense my hope may have begun in my child, in his freshness in the world as I pushed his buggy down the street, this hope has gained strength in its expansion, in a broader perspective that a better, fairer world for includes everyone. all.
Now that my children are both in high school, I see how motherhood – and the hope it inspires – has pushed me to take action; to help create that better world. Now they have their own fears and speculations; there are difficult questions about how to live and what their future will look like. As parents you just want to reassure, and sometimes that doesn’t feel possible. But hope encourages me to go on, to go beyond the boundaries of my own home and my own family and – just as books and films do – to broaden the horizons of my life. When I wrote The ending we assume– and when I watched the film – this felt like something the story has to offer now: a small, steady image of new beginnings, even in the midst of disaster.
