In our youth, “the road ahead seem[s] to draw us steadily on towards real life” – but there comes a time when we all start to look backwards more than forwards. That time has come for Martin Knight, the protagonist of Unfinished Business, Michael Bracewell’s first novel for more than two decades.
Divorced, directionless, utterly anonymous in the workplace and a lonely alcoholic outside it, Knight feels – like John Williams’ everyman (anti-)hero Stoner – that he has been sleepwalking for years, “his life presented to him as though by destiny”. The Sex Pistols’ slogan “No Future”, the former punk ruefully observes, ultimately “conjured neither apocalypse nor anarchy but terminal nostalgia – the most conservative of occupations”. As events conspire to accelerate his retreat into his own “terminal nostalgia” (in stark contrast to his ex-wife Marilyn, who lives “in the present, as she believed that any sensible person should”), he belatedly realises that he has been engaged in “the pursuit of pleasure” rather than “a search for happiness”.
In elegant but unshowy prose, Bracewell deftly captures the continual irruption of fond recollections and acrid regrets into Knight’s consciousness. Deceptively slight, Unfinished Business is a profoundly tragic novel about the cruel passage of time and the increasingly seductive embrace of memories as chilly old age approaches.
Unfinished Business, Michael Bracewell (White Rabbit)
Price: £16.99. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD