Unfinished Business

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As Unfinished Business moves towards its close, Bracewell introduces overt tragedy, with a genuinely upsetting turn of events that comes out of nowhere, along with a faint possibility of partial redemption, but overall, the mood is elegiac. But real anger, such as Martin had provoked when he made his fatal confession – that had been impossible to foresee. The second type puts the emphasis on algia, and does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is… ironic, fragmentary, and singular. [It] accepts (if it does not enjoy) the paradoxes of exile and displacement. Estrangement, both as an artistic device and as a way of life, is part and parcel of ironic nostalgia. But it was impossible to wholly forget the hotel room in which he and Alison had f**ked – there was no other word – surrounded by Empire-style furniture and gilt-framed fake engravings of botanical specimens. And how willingly they had pursued the preceding evening into mounting suggestiveness, as tawdry as it was alluring, there in the Polo Bat of the Westbury hotel.

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. 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] This is not to suggest an easy resolution, or any resolution at all, but Unfinished Business more than earns the right to take its reader this far into a further, subtler realm of estrangement. As it does, it reminds us that, in Bracewell’s hands, nostalgia is less a symptom of decadence than a source of illumination in dark times. His common place talents – mathematics, doing well in interviews for jobs – were, he felt, so at odds with his soul. He was a poet manqué, he had told himself. From that, clearly, all else proceeded…

The end of this book felt unnecessarily tortuous to me (give the man a break), but overall I found this book to be perceptive and poetic, regardless of perhaps not being the target audience. Introduction to the Sotheby's catalogue for Damien Hirst's sale: Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, an introduction (2008) 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”. It is this eagerness, this sense from “40 years ago” that “the road ahead seemed to draw us steadily on towards real life”, which pulls Martin down. Captivated by style (according to his one real friend, he is one of those for whom “atmosphere always atrophies action”) he slides into the hapless condition of perennial romantic, a boy from the suburbs whose ordinary bedroom becomes a “museum of himself”, a construct whose “tenebrous atmosphere of falling dusk and church choral music and cigarette smoke” forms the basis of a persona that is nowhere near robust enough for the world he is about to enter. 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”.

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And here I am, Martin reasoned, and I don’t really know what my job is anymore…As for his “skill” – it had been known as so many things over the years; been in and out of fashion, regarded as both Saviour and Antichrist: logistics, IT, datamanagement, tech, systems analyst…Now it was everything and nothing, like most things.

That sense of falling short, of not quite reaching where he wants to be, is the central theme of the book. A destination glimpsed but never arrived at. The recent years of change in the job market, where jobs and titles come and go in a fleeting blink, is beautifully expressed by Martin in this paragraph: I should note that when I refer to the City of London I am not talking about the whole of London, but a specific area in the East of the central district which has for centuries been the financial heart of the city, where numerous banks and financial institutions were once headquartered. It is an area which corresponds very closely to the old Roman city that lies several metres below the current street level. Descend to the basements of some modern buildings and you will find the long lost past hidden there. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? What Martin is experiencing here is the recognition of a simple, brutal fact: “the rich are rich, and we’re not”. Because owning the world is a serious vocation, the wealthy are interested only in those who play some part in maintaining that possession: “They sought only the company… of people who increased their status – who brought something to the table, as it were; be that best of all an aristocratic, old or famous name, or great wealth, glamour or personal beauty; at the very least – lowest entry level – a talent to amuse.” Martin, who possesses none of these attributes, is bound by his nature to be invisible among such elites. At the same time, he is unable to see past them – unlike his acquaintance, Basil, the man “educated by style”, who knows that it is pointless looking to them “for anything”.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. He is perhaps best known for his 1997 collection, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie. One of the most poignant moments in the novel comes when he is invited to the engagement party of his ex-wife, Marilyn, and the wealthy, superficial, but instinctively self-confident Thomas. Studying her from a distance, Martin notices that Marilyn looks different, but he cannot put his finger on what has changed. A moment later, however, he sees that, “She looked rich – that was it: not just well-off, in that tasteful yet bourgeois north London way, but noticeably wealthy. She was in transit… It was suddenly present in everything she did and wore; in her demeanour as much as her aura.” Focused on Martin Knight, a London-based office worker with a job he no longer understands, Unfinished Business looks at a life unfulfilled and the physical and emotional effects of loneliness and modern coping mechanisms.