Claire North: The End of the Day

Claire North’s The End of the Day is a novel about a youngish man named Charlie with a vey odd job - he is the Harbinger of Death. He does not come to everyone who is to die, no mere human could handle that, but Death does send him ahead to certain select individuals. Charlie doesn’t know why he is sent to some and not to others; the best explanation he can offer is that he is sent, sometimes as a warning, and sometimes to honour the person about to die. He often comes bearing a gift.

Charlie isn’t the only Harbinger, of course, and Death nit the only avatar of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is a world that knows that the four horsemen are real, and that they have human harbingers who come before them.
Charlie knows his colleagues, the Harbingers of Famine, Pestilence and War. Sometimes they run into each other as they travel around the world on their respective missions, and talk shop about life as a Harbinger. Although this is Charlie’s story, we catch glimpses of the paths being travelled by War, Famine, Pestilence and their Harbingers through places we know too well from the news in our world.

The novel is structured episodically; accounts of Charlie’s missions, present and past, are interwoven with scenes if Charlie’s day-to-day life as he tries to maintain a reality outside if his work for Death, and to maintain a relationship with his girlfriend Emmi - who herself struggles with the demands and dangers of loving someone with a job like Charlie’s.

The sections that follow Charlie on his missions and in his life are interspersed with snippets of conversation about current events, most of them shallow, or cruel, or both, some if them heartbreaking. It’s an effect not unlike turning the dial on a radio tuned to every conversation in the world, and clicking methodically through them all. Reading through these buts and pieces, it’s difficult not to feel a growing sense of anger, even despair, at the state of the world, at the inhumanity of man.

Fragments of conversations, fragments of Charlie’s life, fragments of the vast mosaic human experience, of which Charlie normally sees only the penultimate moments - the novel reads like a travelogue of disjointed places, a catalogue of disconnected lives, with Charlie serving as an observer of the best and worse in the human soul.

And yet. Charlie is so human, and humane. He can honestly say he enjoys his job, despite on occasion being beaten, tortured, imprisoned, despite seeing the depths of evil that co-exist with the good. He manages to find joy, to continue to care for people. He honours life. In all its messiness. When he can, he offers comfort, companionship. On some occasions, where he is sent as a warning, or sent to honour courage in the face of horror, he finds a way to help. He offers his home to a dying man whose home has been seized to make way for a new development. He helps two lovers, Nigerian lesbians, escape from a vindictive man who wants to make both this lives agony because they refuse his advances. Charlie is a good man.

On one mission to Greenland, he meets Patrick, a rich businessman, Patrick, who is there because Death himself invited him to witness “the end of a world.” But the only end to be witnessed is that of an old professor and environmentalist who Charlie follows out onto a glacier to deliver his gift of tea. His path and Patrick’s continue to interact at odd moments throughout the novel. Sometimes by chance. Sometimes because Patrick wants to see Charlie. Sometimes, again, because Patrick has once more been invited to “the end of a world” and neither Patrick nor Charlie can figure out why him, why these particular deaths. But Patrick is confident that even if an old world is dying, there is a new world on its way, and he is one of those who creates it.

Charlie keeps on meeting his appointments, but something is changing. He still feels that he honours the lives that have come before the end, but he is growing tired. His head pounds, sometimes. Patrick meets him again, and thinks he looks like hell. He’s kidnapped, again. Afterwards, he sits in a hotel room and counts the painkillers he’s bought. But though Death comes, it’s not Charlie’s time.

I’m not entirely sure what message to take from this book. And North so clearly has a message she wants us to hear. But what comes to me, beyond this fascinating character study of a man with a most difficult and peculiar job, is a list of platitudes. Life goes on. The world keeps turning. Even the worst of humans have something good in them. All things must come to an end. Everything changes. No one is a villain in his own eyes. Love makes the world go ‘round. It’ll be all right in the end.

Maybe that is the message, that all these things are platitudes because they are true.

Reading for the Hugos: Retro Hugo Novella possibilities

Nominating short fiction for the Retro Hugos is difficult. It’s easier with novels, as there were far sff fewer novels published then, and the ones that were, are mostly still in print. But this was in the heyday of the pulps, there was a lot of short fiction published, and most of it is unavailable, unless you collect the classics pulp magazines. While most of the stories that were considered really good have been anthologised, you have to go through a lot of anthologies to read them all, and that’s not easy to do, especially if you’re reading ebooks only.

So, I do what I can. This post contains my thoughts on the eligible novellas I managed to find and read.


In A. E. Van Vogt’s Asylum, a pair of space vampires, aliens who live off both blood and the vital “life force” of their victims, land on an Earth which has developed interplanetary space flight and learned to live without interpersonal violence - rape, murder, even war are considered “social perversions,”

Merla and Jeel are advance scouts for their people, the Dreegh, who violate the laws of Galactic society to raid relatively primitive human planets, harvesting as much blood and life energy as they can before their activities are noticed and thwarted by the Galactic Observers. But this time, Merla and Jeel decide to attack and destroy the system’s Observer before they are noticed, so that the Dreegh can drain Earth of all its life. To do this, they kidnap and interrogate a reporter named William Leigh to help them find the hidden Observer.

The novella is written in a rather florid style, and suffers from too many descriptions of the extreme magnetism and vast intelligence of the nonhuman characters. As well, Van Vogt has some very odd ideas about psychology and how to write internal conflict. I’ve read a fair bit of his work over the years, and I would not rank this among his best, despite the interesting storyline and the foreshadowed but still surprising last minute plot twist. Some pulp sf ages well; this unfortunately did not.


Lester del Ray’s novella Nerves, on the other hand, reads almost like modern fiction, albeit with some quirks in dialogue that mark it as being from an earlier area, and a very bad excuse for a Japanese accent. The novella begins with a team of medical personnel dealing with the aftermath of a serious accident - thirty-odd injured and 17 fatalities - in an industrial facility where an assortment of radioactive products are constructed. The lead physician, Dr. Ferrel, is a former ‘star’ surgeon, who has lost his confidence ever since he had to perform on his dying pregnant wife, and was unable to save her. He has been working in obscurity ever since. His assistant, Dr. Jenkins, a young doctor who once dreamed of being an atomic scientist, is in his own way unsure of his limits, and still longing for the career he could not have.

As the action unfolds, we learn that the plant where everything went drastically wrong was being used to test an experimental process, and that if the still ongoing, but dangerously malfunctioning process isn’t shut down properly, the plabt will explode in a matter of hours, taking the whole facility, and possibly a large region of the populated area nearby, with it. When it turns out that the only man who has the knowledge and experience to safely shut down the process is severely injured and suffering from serious radiation exposure, Drs Ferrel and Jenkins will need every but of their combined experience and background to save the dying atomic engineer. Nerves is a story about damaged people facing an extreme crisis and finding ways to overcome their limitations under pressure. In that sense, it is a very timeless story.


Alfred Bester’s novella Hell is Forever is a rather dull and dreary recapitulation of the rather common idea that hell is of out own making. Of the top of my head, I can think of several plays that have gotten the idea across much better, including Sartre’ No Exit. In Bester’s version, six annoying people accidentally summon something rather like a devil who offers each of them their own reality - which of course turns out to be an eternity of experiencing their own worst nightmares. I really couldn’t get excited about it, it was far too repetitious and once the point is made with the first of the obnoxious protagonists, the fate of the others is of little interest. They are simply not sympathetic enough as characters for us to care about the specifics of each individual hell.


I’ve also reread Heinlein’s novella Waldo. This time around, I feel a strong connection to the title character that is new, and connected to the severe degeneration of my own physical state since my last reading; now, I perceive Waldo as “crip lit” and a fairly sensitive example, for something written by a man who likely perceived himself as able bodied. I was struck by the unifying metaphor of the waldo, the device that allows Waldo to manipulate objects on scales that would be impossible, not just for his crippled self, dealing with severe myasthenia gravis, but in some cases, for any human. This concept is recapitulated in the concept of the Other World which Waldo learns from a traditional hex doctor, the other dimension in which mind resides, and from which mind extends to influence, direct, manipulate the material world through its connections with brain and body.

There are other interesting and very modern ideas in Waldo - including the concern about untested long-term consequences of exposure to new technologies. All in all, a fine example if Heinlein’s early work.


Anthony Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf is a nicely comedic novella about a university professor named Wolfe Wolf who has fallen in love with one of his former students, the actress Gloria Garton. When she declines his marriage proposal, he goes out drinking, meets a magician who calls himself Ozymandias, and learns that he is a werewolf. But that’s only the beginning of the tale, which also involves satanic temples, a German spy ring, and a taking cat.

The tone is light and just a bit on the frivolous side, the story pure entertainment.


Robert Heinlein’s novella The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag takes a fascinating conceit - the world as a work of art - and turns it into a baffling and rather frightening story of supernatural mystery. (And also, in its description of Hoag’s profession as unpleasant, an in-joke for writers.) Jonathan Hoag is an amnesiac. Not only has he no memory of his live before a time five years ago. He has no idea what he does during the day. Distressed by the sudden realisation that he doesn’t really know who he is, he turns to a private detective to discover the things about himself that he doesn’t know.

Their investigation leads to a series of strange events, terrifying nightmares, unnatural threats, and unbelievable encounters, a sense that either they or the world is gong mad. As it turns out, it’s the world that is subtly wrong, and Hoag’s unknown profession carries with it the potential to make things right.

It’s like one of those secret history stories, in a way. It is so very unbelievable, and yet it could be true, and one would never know. Both the story and the concept stay with the reader after the process of reading is over - surely one of the qualities of good art.

Of the novellas I found and read, I thought both of Heinlein’s pieces, plus the Boucher and del Ray offerings, worth nomination. It will be interesting to see what works others found and decided to nominate.