The End of the Day by Claire North
My rating: 3/5 cats
although i own all of claire north’s previous books, this is the first one i’ve actually read. i’m like the library of congress up in here, just grabbing up all the books for my archives.
her books have always seemed like exactly the kind i would love, but i wasn’t over-the-moon crazy about this one. it is my understanding that it’s kind of a departure for her, and maybe not the best place to start, so i’ll definitely read those others i have lying around before i regret my grabbing.
if you want to read a well-written and positive review by someone familiar with the author’s work, go read brad’s. mine isn’t going to be very useful.
it was just kind of flat. the concept is fun – you have your four horsemen: famine, war, pestilence, and death, represented as humanoid beings wandering the world, doing what they do best. and each of the four have their own harbinger – reconceived here as a position held by a mortal, with a whole interview process, mentoring system and some bennies. and these harbingers go forth for their bosses and do the whole meet-and-greet before the clip clop of devastating ponies, some handling PR or community relations, some on the research or groundwork-laying side of things. although all four harbingers appear, this book is centered on the experiences of charlie, the harbinger of death, formerly of birmingham, england.
the concept is one i have encountered a variant of before, in piers anthony’s incarnations of immortality, a series i read at least ten times in my youthful days, in which humans are selected for or stumble into the responsibility of assuming physically the offices of such abstract concepts as war, death, nature, fate, etc etc.
there’s also this pretty meh YA series called riders of the apocalypse, the last of which i still have to read, even though i haven’t really enjoyed any of them so far, which is the same kind of deal as the anthony, but with troubled teens doing the officeholding and the scope limited to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. i’ve read Hunger (famine), Rage (war), and Loss (pestilence), and i know i will have to face death (Breath), but i’m not going gentle into it.
with this one here, i liked charlie, and i liked the idea of the harbinger of death being deployed not only for people who were literally facing death, but that he also handled situations in which the ‘death’ was figurative – the death of an idea, a way of life, a language. i also liked the fact that he wasn’t always sent as a finality, that there were many people he visited for whom life was still an option:
”I’m the one who’s sent before. I’m not…My presence is not the end. Sometimes I am sent as courtesy, sometimes as warning. I never know which.”
the courtesy is having a presence nearby to compassionately assist the dying in their final journey, and the warning is just a different kind of courtesy; the tough-love intervention that a particular path leads only to death and an individual being given the opportunity to change. which not everyone is willing to do.
my main difficulty with this book was that i struggled with what it was meant to leave the reader with, the why of it. it reads like a character study, with examples of what a character like this would do and who he would meet along the way, but there’s no boom to it tying the whole thing together. it’s episodic and meandering, and it feels unfinished somehow, unglazed.
it’s entertaining enough; occasionally sad, sweet, touching, horrifying, or funny, but there’s not much in the way of resolution: charlie meets characters, delivers his warning or hand-holding, they either live or die and then they drift from the page and we move on. it’s more concept than narrative, which is a perfectly valid approach to storytelling, but not one that’s ever really appealed to me. the writing is good, with moments of great, and several of the stories worked really well as contained entities, but i couldn’t locate any unifying theme or intent. maybe if this had been structured as a series of linked short stories with the ends shaved off a bit and all of the continuity-arc removed it would have been a more satisfying read for me.
it did give me one chilling moment, though, which i am interpreting as my own “warning,” in the story of a man who has lost everything and has become homeless and desperate, trying to bargain with death:
“I…I just need a helping hand,” he whispered at last. “I just…I just need someone to see me, waiting here. That’s all I need, and then I’ll rebuild again. I swear to you, I’ll rebuild, I just need someone to see!”
i’m not homeless just yet (yay!), but i’ve been struggling for a while since being laid off from my dream job – working little bitty jobs and freelance stuff that doesn’t pay much, exhausting myself by putting all of my energy into making ends meet and too run down and anxious at the end of the day to find something better. and i want to rebuild and i want someone to see me, but being so tired and dispirited has really killed my confidence and i’m just stuck, and it’s a slippery slope and i’m probably on the road to becoming this man – yelling at death to gimmie something productive to do where my skills and dedication can be appreciated in the form of $$. and death will say “no.”
i’m not sure if it is the death of hope or potential, but i definitely need a change.
i told you to go read brad’s…
