I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Claire North deserves to be recognised as one of the best science fiction writers currently active in the UK. Yet she’s been consistently ignored by British genre awards, and her novels are rarely discussed or reviewed in fan circles.
Why is this? True, she doesn’t relentlessly self-promote on social media, her books are not set in a single universe of her own invention, and, while her novels are definitely genre, they’re not heartland genre per se. Nonetheless, they deserve to be much better known.
The End of the Day (2017, UK) is, like North’s other novels, high-concept, but also a great deal more than its simple premise. In the world of the novel, which is identical to our world in all ways but one — and that is its central conceit: the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are real.
The protagonist of The End of the Day is Charlie, who is employed as the Harbinger of Death. He’s an unassuming man, who lives in London, but travels all around the world for his job. Which is to visit people and offer them a gift from Death, “sometimes as a warning, sometimes a courtesy”. Sometimes, it’s not even a person that’s passing, but an idea. Nor does Charlie visit everyone who’s dying — he is, after all, only human.
The novel opens with Charlie visiting an old woman in the Andean mountains who is the last speaker of her language. Later, Charlie is sent to Greenland — Death runs an office in Milton Keynes (appropriately?), which manages all of Charlie’s missions and travel requirements. But the person Charlie has been sent to find has gone north, onto the ice. Charlie, with a Greenlandic guide, sets off in pursuit. They find the man, but he’s near-death. Charlie visits before Death, he doesn’t witness the death of his “clients”.
Also present when Charlie and the Greenlander find the man is Patrick, a London-based billionaire who has been invited by Death, via email, to be present when Charlie finds his client. Charlie’s and Patrick’s paths cross several times throughout the novel, but Patrick’s role, or rather, what Death wants of him, is not entirely clear.
I’m guessing Patrick represents the future, a late-stage-capitalist plutocratic future, which is sort of like the world we have now… or will have in a few years… Which is where The End of the Day’s strength really lies. Because, for all its high-concept and, perhaps one might say, the limitations of its premise, North is actually telling the story of the passing of all the social, economic and political gains made around the world, but especially in the UK, during the twentieth century. This is a novel about Brexit as much as it is a novel about Death, War, Famine and Pestilence.
The End of the Day follows Charlie as he visits a number of clients. There are flashbacks, which illustrate the nature of his job, and occasions where it didn’t go as planned. Such as the Belorussian plutocrat who thought he could cheat Death. There are also interludes with the other three Horseman — who are sometimes women — as they go about their business, enabling conflict, starvation and disease.
There’s no real plot as such, just a sequence of Charlie’s encounters, except perhaps in the infrequent meetings between Charlie and Patrick. But it’s hard to see Patrick as the harbinger of the future, for all that he’s clearly a one-percenter. If his meetings with Charlie are intended to educate him in some fashion, it’s not clear how. Certainly the novel makes it plain how most people misunderstand Charlie’s role, or even Death’s role — including the plutocrat who arranges for Charlie to be kidnapped and tortured in order to learn the secret of Death’s power. The point being, of course, that Death is a natural force, an embodiment of the world as it exists, and Charlie, the Harbinger of Death, is just a person like everyone else.
How people die often says much about how they lived — or rather, how they were forced, or constrained, to live. The End of the Day is a novel about the second decade of the twenty-first century, with particular focus on the UK but with a global perspective. And by anthropomorphising death, treating it as an established institution, Death is highlighted as an agent of change. Each of Charlie’s clients embody a moment of change in the world — linguistic, economic, political — and Charlie is there to witness it.
There are those who get really quite upset about politics in their science fictions, but it’s impossible to ignore politics in any genre of fiction. Those readers… they’re really avoiding politics with which they disagree. And, let’s be honest, it’s mostly people from a particular end of the political spectrum who are the first to get upset.
Those readers? They’re not going to like The End of the Day. It’s as critical of Brexit as Ali Smith’s Four Seasons Quartet, and just as oblique. Of course, North is genre writer and has never come within sniffing distance of the Booker, but I don’t think it’s an unfair comparison. Smith is the… more literary writer, and I say that not solely because Smith is marketed as a literary writer. But North doesn’t have Smith’s consistency of output — North’s novels are generally good, but they’re very different, and The End of the Day is perhaps the most focused of her novels I’ve read.
North is likely one of the UK’s best currently active genre writers. She’s original, each of her novels are very different, and she continues to produce interesting work. The End of the Day is, I think, one of her best novels.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Claire North deserves to be recognised as one of the best science fiction writers currently active in the UK.
