The End of the Day

Claire North is an author I’ve long admired for her sheer inventiveness.  Every book she writes has a plot that is completely original, totally interesting, and very different from each of her previous books.  In The End of the Day we meet Charlie who is the harbinger of Death (as an aside I’ve developed a bit of love for that word harbinger from reading this --- it is a very fun word to just say out loud).  Charlie is the one who goes before Death, sometimes as a courtesy sometimes with a warning.  Charlie in other words is a witness of the living and of the ideas of the living. 

While the book is fascinating it is also depressing.  Charlie is witnessing, and sharing with us, some pretty strong evidence about the amazing amount of inhumanity currently extant in the world and raising the strongly implied possibility that he is witnessing the end of all (human) life not just the end of some particular lives.  The book really gets at the current zeitgeist vis a vis global warming, corrosive political ideology, and humanitarian crises of every description.

Charlie is amazingly inarticulate for the character that is supposed to be telling us what is going on and, in fact, the whole book uses a sort of half thought fractured style of exposition that leaves the reader having to fill in a lot of the details.  This is definitely a book that will read very differently to each reader but I would highly recommend it.  Check it out and then go find North’s other books.