The (Non)Sense of an Ending

  You can bet that the final entry on this blog probably won’t be a final sayonara to my readers (statistically, it’ll probably be a wrestling review).  The nature of the blog as a form is such that most writers start off with the best of intentions, gradually lose interest or find that they don’t have enough time to post frequently, and things come to a halt.  It happens.  What I mean to say is, Stone Cold Jane Austen is more likely to simply stop, than have a proper ending.

  I’ve been thinking about endings recently, as a couple of weeks ago I finished Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!, a novel I’d been meaning to read for years.  I thought it was a fantastic, biting evisceration of the values of self-interest, ruthless free market capitalism, and the umbrella ideology of Thatcherism.  As a bleeding-heart leftie, I empathised with the book’s concerns, but independently of its politics, it’s a damn good read.  But the last hundred pages aren’t that great.  Don’t get me wrong; they’re not bad at all.  It’s just that the last section of the book changes tone in quite a jarring way, as Coe’s critique of 80s Britain is joined by a rather macabre aesthetic, as a string of gothic murders are committed by persons unknown, during a night in a creaking country pile.  In a way, the change of tone in the final part of What a Carve Up! is the point; the narrator essentially ‘checks out’ of his own narrative due to a trauma-induced dissociative episode, and the events at Winshaw Towers tie in with the novel’s echoes of the 1961 comedy film that shares a title with the novel, and which is an obsession of the hilariously-named protagonist, Michael Owen (the book was written in 1994, when the oft-injured starlet was sequestered within the bowels of Liverpool’s youth system).  I get what Coe’s doing, but I don’t feel that it was carried off as effectively as the previous chapters.  You can see each slaying coming from a mile off, and it’s just too different to the rest of the book, in my opinion.

  This isn’t the first time that Coe has disappointed me with an ending; the first novel of his I ever read was The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010), his most recent effort.  This was an entirely different kettle of fish.  My gripe with the final section of What a Carve Up! is that merely that it doesn’t quite live up to the very high standards of the rest of it.  The last chapter of Maxwell Sim is, as I believe F.R. Leavis would have said, a complete shitfest.  The penultimate chapter, by contrast, seems to bring the narrative to an end in a very moving manner.  But then Coe adds a few more pages, in which he appears to his protagonist, informs poor Maxwell Sim that he is simply a created character in a book, and tells him that as soon as the novel ends, he will no longer exist.  Sucks to be him.  And indeed, to be me, for I had to read it.  Just in case you’re thinking that I’m being too harsh on an original and clever narrative device, I wrote my MA dissertation on authorial self-insertion, and read about two dozen novels, novellas and short stories that utilise this metafictional device (far more than I should have if I wanted an easy life), by authors like Borges, Calvino, Roth, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Ballard, and so on.  All of these tomes used the trope in far richer and more subtle ways than Coe.  Before I write another 12,000 words on the subject, let me make it clear.  I hate the ending of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.  Hope that clears everything up.

  But maybe I shouldn’t be too harsh on Maxwell Sim (actually, I regret nothing.  NOTHING.)  It really is hard to do a successful ending, whatever the medium.  Some endings are too predictable, whereas others are seen to give insufficient closure.  The literary critic Frank Kermode – no relation to everybody’s favourite giant-handed film critic – wrote a book called The Sense of an Ending in which he remarked upon this very difficulty.  He warned against predictability, writing that ‘the story that proceeded very simply to its obviously predestined end would be nearer myth than novel or drama[...]The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality’.  This brings me to another disappointing reading experience of mine; Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.  Like What a Carve Up!, I’d say the novel was good, and it’d be stretching it to call a book featuring blue pixies from another dimension ‘predictable’.  But the ending of 1Q84 combined the worst of both worlds mentioned above.  The relationship between the two main characters was resolved in the most predictable and ‘closed’ way, but pretty much nothing else was.  I know that if I railed against ambiguous endings I wouldn’t be even half the fan of the Coen Brothers that I am, but damn it all, I wanted to know what the deal with the pixies was!  The plot line with the pixies didn’t end so much ambiguously as not at all, and it was by no means the only thread left unfollowed to its termination.  What made it worse was that the book had gone on for 1300 pages, which only exacerbated a conclusion that I found weak and unsatisfying.  I’m glad that Murakami didn’t win the Nobel Prize for that, I can tell you, and he was predicted to.  He had odds of 2/1.  Because William Hill will allow you to bet on anything.

  On the other hand, endings which attempt to tie everything up are also tricky to pull off.  Let me move, like I do at the end of a long day’s work on my thesis, from books to TV.  The Wire did this kind of finale very well, with a wordless panorama of the lives of its characters, showing their fates and futures, while the show’s theme played in the background.  And then there was the last David Tennant episode of Doctor Who.  Oh, man.  The Doctor defeated the Master, saved the world/universe/multiverse (I really can’t remember), and received the lethal dose of radiation that meant that the tenth incarnation of the character was not long for this world.  There were still twenty minutes left.  How are they going to fill that, I wondered.  What we got was the Tenth Doctor touring all of his past acquaintances, saying his goodbyes, in one of the most egregiously tedious and self-indulgent televisual circlejerks it has ever been my misfortune to watch.  It made me wish that I myself had a TARDIS so that I could find Russell T. Davies, dissuade him of the notion that this was a good idea, and then as his penance for ‘Love and Monsters’ (the episode with Peter Kay as the Abzorbaloff, in a rare appearance where he wasn’t recycling a stand-up routine about growing up in the 80s), force him to listen to the phrase ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’ until he finds it as irritating as I did the first time I bloody heard it.

  Ahem.  There are also TV endings which are just unsatisfying for miscellaneous reasons.  Lost enraged legions of fans who for months had been speculating how all the mysterious signs and threads of the series’ convoluted narrative would play into the show’s finale, only for the ending to be ‘It Was All A Dream’, which is far below even ‘The Author Turns Up RIGHT AT THE BLOODY END FOR FUCK’S SAKE JONATHAN COE And Tells The Character He Isn’t Real’ in the pantheon of tropes that should go away forever.  The Sopranos, one of my favourite TV dramas of all time, notoriously finished its run with a cut to black, leaving it uncertain whether Tony Soprano got shot by the New York mafia, or whether he lived to fight another day and instead die of a heart attack in a hotel in Italy (God, I’m so sorry).  This wouldn’t have been so bad, except Journey’s classic song Don’t Stop Believin’ was playing in the background, in a complete misstep on the part of the writers.  I love that song, or at least I did until Glee ruined it like Glee ruins everything, but I have no idea what it was doing at that juncture.  As Coen Brothers films like No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man show, you can do an inconclusive ending, but you have to do it well.  Don’t have one of the greatest shows in history end with a power ballad and a blank screen.

  Maybe the best endings are deferred.  By which I mean, ones that haven’t happened yet.  You never find fans of soap operas like Emmerdale, Eastenders or WWE Raw complaining about endings, because there aren’t any.  Currently the two drama series held in the highest esteem by critics are Mad Men and Breaking Bad, both of which have just one more season announced.  However they conclude, you can bet that people like me will be on the internet complaining about them.  Because ultimately, a major part of the entertainment value of books or television lies in the imagining of narrative possibilities.  As soon as a novel or a TV series ends, these possibilities are closed off.  The fiction can never be what we imagined it could be.  We may find the ending too predictable, too open, or simply fundamentally misjudged.  But more than that, the ending is always much, much too final.

  Yeah, now that’s how you do an ending to a blogpost.  No need to add anything unnecessary like Coe did.  No need at all.

  Did I mention I hate the last chapter of The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim?