Book Review | The End of the Day by Claire North

At the end of the day, Death visits everyone. Right before that, Charlie does. Sometimes he is sent as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning. He never knows which.

You might meet him in a hospital, in a warzone, or at the scene of a traffic accident. Then again, you might meet him at the North Pole—he gets everywhere, our Charlie.

Would you shake him by the hand, take the gift he offers, or would you pay no attention to the words he says?

***

I've fallen for every one of Claire North's novels. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Touch and The Sudden Appearance of Hope have between them broken my heart and expanded my mind. They've thrilled me and they've chilled me. By way of them I've been exposed to new places, new ideas—new ways of being, even. But if I had to level a single criticism against her thoughtful body of work, it would have to be directed at its measure, because whilst her texts have tackled a great many meaningful themes, not least the array of ways we determine identity, I've found North's literary positions a little non-committal.

That's not the case in The End of the Day. This is a book with something to say; something important, if I may. It's slow to start, and oddly episodic even when the plot has picked up; its characters come and go with next to no notice; it's difficult, and confusing, and contradictory—but that's what life is like, right? And the messy, maddening, magical gift of life we've all been given, that's what The End of the Day deals in: not death... although its principal perspective is on her payroll.

Like North's other novels, The End of the Day is a high concept travelogue of sorts, but this fiction's frequent flier is Charlie, and Charlie just got hired! He's to be the Harbinger of the foremost of the apocryphal horsemen, of which singular position Death gives this description:

The Harbinger is a mortal, a bridge between this world and the next. In the old days I used eagles, but people stopped paying attention to them after a while—just birds in he sky—[so] I switched to humans a few thousand years ago. One must move with the times. (pp.12-13)

North doesn't waste any time reinventing the wheel here. Death appears in any number of forms over the course of the story. Sometimes he's male and sometimes she isn't; from time to time she has a scythe; here and there, horns protrude from his lumpen skull. "In all other respects he was the figure she had known would come, the god of the underworld, exactly as the stories said he would be." (p.14)

Charlie, on the other hand, is just a puny human.

Book Review | The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

A master storyteller at his best—the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. 'Afterlife' is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanours. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in 'Obits'; the old judge in 'The Dune' who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In 'Morality,' King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

***

"I never feel the limitations of my talent so keenly as I do when writing short fiction," confesses Stephen King in the introduction to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: an unusually introspective yet no less effective collection of eighteen variously terrifying tales, plus a few pieces of poetry, from the affable author of last year's similarly reflective Revival.

This is far from the first time King has discussed his "struggle to bridge the gap between a great idea and the realisation of that idea's potential," and although, as readers, we only have the end product to parse, the ideas the Edgar Award winner explores here—and the characters, and the narratives—are not at all inadequate. If anything, in dispensing with the hallmarks of Halloweeny horror to which his bibliography is so bound in order to investigate a goody bag of markedly more grounded goings-on, the stories brought together in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams number among King's most thoughtful and evocative.

Which isn't to say they ain't scary. They absolutely are! 'Premium Harmony,' 'Batman and Robin Have an Altercation' and 'Herman Wouk is Still Alive,' for instance, are still seething somewhere under this critic's skin, but said tales are scary in a more mundane way than you might imagine. Respectively, they address the mindless last fight between a man and his wife, the hellish senselessness of senility and suicide as a means of finally achieving freedom.

If the components of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams have a common denominator, and I dare say they do, it's death... but death by misadventure, or as a direct result of dubious decisions, or as something that simply comes, like the setting of the sun, as opposed to death by killer car, or wicked witch, or eldritch mist. According to Dave Calhoun, the elderly subject of 'Mr Yummy,' a bittersweet story set in an Assisted Living facility, "death personified isn't a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks." (p.350)

Death is depicted in countless other, equally ordinary ways over the course of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: as a name sketched in the sand in 'The Dune,' an unpleasant smell in 'Under the Weather' and an increasingly meek mutt in 'Summer Thunder.' King hasn't suddenly come over all subtle, but this collection clearly chronicles a gentler, more contemplative author than the purveyor of penny dreadfuls whose part he has played with such panache in the past.

Book Review | The Language of Dying by Sarah Pinborough

Tonight is a special, terrible night.

A woman sits at her father's bedside watching the clock tick away the last hours of his life. Her brothers and sisters — all traumatised in their own ways, their bonds fragile — have been there for the past week, but now she is alone.

And that's always when it comes.

As the clock ticks in the darkness, she can only wait for it to find her...

***

In my review of Mayhem, published this past spring, I suggested that generations hence, people will revere this as the year of Sarah Pinborough. With six of her books published in the six months since, I think my argument still stands. There was Poison, Charm and Beauty too — a trio of neat novellas riffing on familiar fairy tales with such warmth and wit that Once Upon a Time seems shallow and artless in comparison — whilst the final volume of her first trilogy, The Forgotten Gods, will be re-released in North America in early December, as the previous books in said series have been throughout 2013.

It falls to The Language of Dying to bring the year of Sarah Pinborough to a conclusion, and the postscript it presents is both bittersweet and truly beautiful. It's a life-affirming short novel about a tired old man waiting to die and the family of five that come together to bid him goodbye, and though I did not enjoy it at all, from first to last I admired The Language of Dying wholeheartedly.

It begins, as will we, with this:

There is a language to dying. It creeps like a shadow alongside the passing years and the taste of it hides in the corners of our mouths. It finds us whether we are sick or healthy. It is a secret hushed thing that lives in the whisper of the nurses' skirts as they rustle up and down our stairs. They've taught me to face the language one syllable at a time, slowing creating an unwilling meaning. 

Cheyne-Stoking. (p.1)

In other words a common consequence of chain smoking; as is the terminal lung cancer our unnamed narrator's father has. He's been struggling for months, falling further and further from the waking world for weeks, and with only her to help; meanwhile she, as we'll see, has issues of her own — not least the fear that she simply doesn't fit. To her credit, however, she's been with him since the beginning of this... and she'll see it through to the end as well.

Book Review | More Than This by Patrick Ness

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A boy drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments. He dies.

Then he wakes, naked, bruised and thirsty, but alive.

How can this be? And what is this strange, deserted place?

As he struggles to understand what is happening, the boy dares to hope. Might this not be the end? Might there be more to this life, or perhaps this afterlife?

***

A decade on from The Crash of Hennington, this April saw the publication of Patrick Ness's first novel ostensibly for adults since his little-seen 2003 debut... and what a novel The Crane Wife was! At the time, I concluded that it was "simply sublime: a story as strange, ultimately, as it is true," and to be sure, it's still sitting pretty in my list of the year's best books. Now the two-time Carnegie Medal award-winner is back doing... well, I wouldn't say what he does best, not after the enchanting affair aforementioned, but doing, again, the thing with which he's found the most success: genre fiction by way of YA.

But this isn't the YA of your young adulthood. Not by any stretch of the imagination — and there's imagination aplenty in More Than This. It's searching, but soaring. Inconceivably bleak and indisputably brilliant. It's as speculative as anything Ness has written in the years since he appeared on the scene, yet the weird has rarely felt so real; the surreal so sweetly sincere.

Incredibly, it begins with the death — with the drowning — of our poor protagonist Seth, culminating in an "impact just behind his left ear [which] fractures his skull, splintering it into his brain, the force of it also crushing his third and fourth vertebrae, severing both his cerebral artery and his spinal cord, an injury from which there is no return, no recovery. No chance." (p.11)

Be that as it may, this end is a beginning as well, because Seth doesn't simply cease to exist. He's dead, yes, but his life, in some form, goes on...

"The first moments after the boy's death pass for him in a confused and weighty blur," (p.15) and they're apt to affect readers reeling from the mercilessness of Seth's postmortem-esque end equally. But time ticks ever on. "An impossible amount of time passes," in fact; be it "a day, a year, maybe even an eternity, there is no way he can know. Finally, in the distance, the light begins to slowly, almost imperceptibly change." (p.16)

Little by little, things become clearer. Somehow, Seth has awoken in his old house in England, where he and his little brother Owen were brought up before they moved to America. It seems uncannily alike the selfsame summer, he realises, that something indescribably horrible happened in his past; the very unfortunate event that led them to emigrate in the first place. Seth knows it's important, but he can't quite put his finger on what it was.

The village, in any event, is different. That is to say it's much the same as Seth remembers it in many ways, except unnaturally empty — there's no-one to be seen, certainly; there's no traffic, no noise, no nothing — plus it's covered in thick layers of what our protagonist assumes is undisturbed dirt and dust. And that's hardly the half of it. As Seth senses, "this place is more wrong than even all that's obvious. There's an unreality under all the dust, all the weeds. Ground that seems solid but that might give way any moment." (p.51) An indeterminate number of days later — days punctuated by dreams of experiences so vivid that he's practically reliving them — he reflects as follows:

It feels real enough. Certainly to the touch, and definitely to the nose. But it's also a world that only seems to have him in it, so how real can it be? If this is just a dusty old memory that he's trapped in, maybe it isn't really even a place at all, maybe it's just what happens when your final dying seconds turn into an eternity. The place of the worst season of your life, frozen forever, decaying without ever really dying. (p.79)

There are others, then, but Seth's first serious theory is that he's in hell, or some other aspect of the afterlife. Purgatory, perhaps. Speaking of which, please: leave your Lost baggage in the basement, where in all honesty it belongs. More Than This isn't that. What it is, exactly, is difficult to describe without spoiling the surprise. I'll only imply — as Ness does, very neatly indeed — that it has something to do with a pivotal point in our protagonist's past, a memory that Seth refuses to face... of an accident... a prolonged trauma, suffered by another, and perpetuated by his parents.

He stops. The memory is a dangerous one. He can feel himself teetering again, an abyss of confusion and despair looking right back up at him, threatening to swallow him if he so much as glances at it. [...] That can be for later, he tells himself. You're hungry. Everything else can wait. (p.47)

Only in this way, by focussing wholly on his immediate needs — by existing in physical and psychological isolation both figuratively and literally — can Seth keep on keeping on. He knows of no other option.

Besides Seth's death, so little happens in the opening chapters of More Than This that you'd think it'd be boring. But no. If you’ve come across Ness’s narratives in the past, this shall not shock. If you haven’t, your first order of business is to buy up his entire back catalogue — and be assured that the author’s newest novel is riveting, edge-of-your-reading-seat stuff from beginning to end.

The early sections are reminiscent of The Silent Land by Graham Joyce; something of a prose stylist himself, though Ness, I’d stress, has the edge. He effects in the reader a feeling of wonder and discovery paired with an impalpable sense of threat, very much mirroring Seth’s own outlook. Whilst we experience More Than This from the third-person perspective, its painstaking narration perfectly reflects our protagonist’s inexorable descent into despair. And as his awareness of the nature of this place escalates, ours does too.

There is more to More Than This than this... much more, yet many of the novel's successes depend on Seth's struggle to work out what in hell (ahem) has happened to him, where he is, and above all else, why. As such, there’s a whole lot I can't talk about. What I will say is that Ness is winningly aware of the expectations he's inviting here. After parsing one rather far-fetched rationalisation of his situation, Seth even echoes said sentiment:

“Crap sci-fi,” Seth mutters to himself. “Life is never actually that interesting. It’s the kind of story—“He stops again.

It's the kind of story where everything's explained by one big secret, like [...] what's real and what's not being reversed. The kind of story you watched for two hours, were satisfied with the twist, and then got on with your life.

The kind of story his own mind would provide to make sense of this place. (pp.247-248)

Well, you know... yes and no. Truth be told, the denouement is likely to prove divisive. Some, I’m sure, will call it a cop-out. I think it knows exactly what it’s about.

At times, More Than This is like a literary experiment that only by the grace of its creator resulted in a proper novel, but in the hands of a poised, perfectionist prose-smith like Patrick Ness, it's rarely less than life-affirming.

***

More Than This
by Patrick Ness

UK Publication: September 2013, Walker Books
US Publication: September 2013, Candlewick Press

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