Unfinished Business

Product Information

Any feelings of bemusement may be attributed to the unpredictable rhythms of Bracewell’s narrative, its winding, sinuous convolutions a nod to the working of memory itself. The technique was on display in his previous book Souvenir, a jewelled memoir of London from 1979 to 1986. Even when an episode’s place in the larger scheme is obscure, Bracewell has an amazing gift for putting you in the room with his characters, nowhere more hauntingly than a late digression about a one-night stand that almost happened between Martin and his friend Hannah in a flat on Craven Street – a secretive Georgian terrace running alongside Charing Cross – whose freezing upstairs sitting room “felt as though they were camping out on a dark ridge, alone”. A Bracewellian scene, hung with shadows, murmurous with implication: in the years that followed, “neither of them discussed that evening”. Alison, chance-met in regent Street – ‘ Oh, hello!’ – whom he had worked and flirted with, briefly and timidly, when? Ten, a dozen years earlier? When he had not known Marilyn was pregnant… Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops Then, as an aspiring member of hermetic communities to which he cannot possibly belong (his wife’s family, for example, whose mind games are defined by the belief that “it’s never enough… to win. Others must be seen to fail”), he is not so much rejected as politely ignored by the men and women whose power he is inherently incapable of sharing.

He is perhaps best known for his 1997 collection, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie. Michael Bracewell (born 7 August 1958) is a British writer and novelist. He was born in London, and educated at the University of Nottingham, graduating in English and American Studies. That Unfinished Business is Bracewell’s first novel in more than two decades may say something about the state of British fiction but, whatever the reason for the hiatus, the book is a welcome return from a master of the form. In some ways, its concerns are familiar from Bracewell’s earlier work: Martin Knight, a middle-ranking office worker now in his late fifties, has reached a professional and personal impasse, having recently separated from his wife after a brief infidelity (to which he was foolish enough to confess).If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

A comprehensive collection of Bracewell's essays can be found in The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art, edited by Doro Globus and published by Ridinghouse in 2012. [1] You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. For an hour or so, he was suspended, weightless, in a pause in time that was meaningful and poetic and enabled him to see immense distances. He simply had to stay forever in this stilled floating moment, in which, everything was benign and comfortably significant. The underlying malaise of our time is an improperly diagnosed and so routinely untreated nostalgia. The most persuasive historian of this condition was Svetlana Boym, who identified two types of nostalgia. The first stresses nostos, or homecoming, and is “reconstructive and collective”: The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel’s climax stuns like a concussion – worse than that, because it’s not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming. The aftermath of the loss steers us towards a bruised diminuendo, and an affecting acceptance that for some it’s time to move on, or move out. “The former things had passed away.” But I suspect this Temps Perdu of a melancholy journeyman will reverberate long after the book is closed.

Find a book you’ll love, get our Word Up newsletter

For recently, he fancied, he had become aware of an overview - a symptom of age, no doubt; his life presented to him as though by destiny, with an unnerving and unexpected shrug - ‘There you go then’ - dismissive, final.”