Unfinished Business

This is a short and powerful work, both curious and compelling. Bracewell often defied classification, having established a greater reputation as a cultural commentator, per Souvenir, even if his early fiction, per The Conclave, was also excellent. Similar in some ways to Souvenir, Unfinished Business can be read partly as a meditation on London. His eye for detail and ability to capture the ambience and rhythms of different parts of the city, at different times of the day, is superb. But nothing and everything happen in Unfinished Business. There is a major and totally unanticipated tragedy, the death of the protagonist's daughter in a car accident. But Bracewell focuses more on the question of loss in the broadest sense of the word, asking the question of what is a life, how it changes, particularly in the context of the inevitable decay associated with late middle age. The prose is haunting and elegiac, a bit like a literary version of a Hopper painting. Memorable, 8/10.

By Michael Bracewell