It’s almost the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 and as someone once said (probably on an inspirational calendar) “The end of one thing is the beginning of something else”.
Having watched a bit of telly over the last week I’ve been thinking about endings and how important they are. Last night I watched a Star Wars film, Rogue One. I really like Star Wars films but the best writers must have been on their hols when this one was made.
I often have to ask DH for clarification as to what is going on but that film was more muddled than I could cope with and I could not believe the ending – everyone was killed: the mother, the father, the hero and heroine, all the goodies – every single one!
I was meant to feel that they’d laid down their lives for a great cause, but I didn’t get the same feeling I got when Sydney Carton (forever Dirk Bogarde to me) sacrificed himself so the woman he loved could marry someone else. That made me cry. Star Wars didn’t; I just sat on the sofa and waited for the last minute rescue that should have happened but didn’t. I felt cheated.
An ending that always feels like a big cheat is that in Little Women. Jo doesn’t marry fun-loving, handsome Laurie and instead she gets hitched to boring, middle-aged Professor Bhaer. How could she? This was a girl of passion, a girl who sold her hair and wrote in a cold attic so desperate was she to be a writer. How could she settle for the mundane? I know why, it’s because her creator, Louisa M Alcott, liked high-minded men. She chose her own ideal man, not the one the story demanded, and she let her readers down.
JK Rowling has admitted that she may have made a mistake when she didn’t have Harry Potter and Hermione walk into the sunset along platform 13 and a half. I believe she didn’t want to do the expected thing, but in trying to do the unexpected, she let her readers down.
Sometimes an unexpected ending does work; Rhett Butler stopped loving Scarlett O’Hara just when she realised she loved him. I was 16 or 17 when I read Gone with the Wind and when I’d finished it I cried for days; I’ve never been able to read it again. Margaret Mitchell offered a chink of hope that Scarlett might win him back, but not much of one.
Books are such powerful things, so intimate, it’s just you and the story, no one else comes between you and the writer, and its the writer’s job to get it right. Quite often she does.
I wish you hours of happy reading – and happy endings in 2020!
