Unfinished Business

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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. 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 cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. This book has some really beautiful language in it, and does a great job at examining those feelings and parts of life that we churn through unconsciously (one of my favourite types of writing). While short in length, this book isn’t one to inhale in a single sitting. I spent a lot of time chewing over every word, needing to take my time to digest it and re-read sentences again to feel the full impact.

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. 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. 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.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. 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”. 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. Introduction to the Sotheby's catalogue for Damien Hirst's sale: Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, an introduction (2008)

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. 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: Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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? 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”:

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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”.