Endings

It's nice to be able to upload entries again, but I still can't manage to get this thing to reflect my paragraphing. Oh well. Today I finished Matthew Kneale's English Passengers and Les Murray's Fredy Neptune. There has been much to enjoy in both, especially at a stylistic level, and I suppose there's been a certain commonality of theme, and setting: Australia, the sea, human cruelty. The ending of the poem saw Fredy being able to feel again, related it seemed to some kind of forgiveness in him - amongst others he was able to forgive God, a big idea indeed. I didn't quite pick up on the significance of Fredy's cure though. I suppose that I felt it was obviously going to come by the end of the story and I was more interested in the situation Fredy & family would be in when it all finished - curiously I never thought for a moment that the poem would end in Fredy's death, despite the extreme situations he kept finding himself in. I found myself reading the poem almost as one might follow a tv soap. That reflects the thinness of my reading but also the engaging nature of the story & its characters. English Passengers had the more obviously satisfying ending (at least, at first glance.) All ends were neatly tied with enough that was unexpected yet appropriate to give a further level of satisfaction. The emergence of the doctor, Potter, as a genuinely sinister villain was a development I didn't expect but it worked beautifully in the full context of the novel. There was a fascinating postscript also on the emergence of theories of racial superiority in the nineteenth century that helped give a context to Potter's awful ideas.