Ending Up, by Kingsley Amis

I’ve heard or read mention of this author a number of times before, and so was curious to read something of his myself.  His son, Martin Amis, is also a novelist, so I picked up one of his books as well.  I’m now hopeful that the son can measure up to the work of the father, because I found this book to be brilliant.  It’s a short novel, just over a hundred pages in this printing, and I read it in two sittings.

I’m not a fan of stories about people with some exceptional gift, or the great and powerful, or especially the supernatural.   Don’t bother me with vampires and werewolves, the undead and such tommyrot.  It’s real people that interest me.  Ending Up is about regular people getting old, five regular people in particular, living together in rural England in 1972.  None of them is happy of course with the declines that accompany aging, and they cope in different ways.  It is those different ways that, intentional or oblivious, irritate one another.  

It could be a sad, desperate sort of story, but Amis plays it out with intense humor.  I literally laughed out loud at least half a dozen times.  Books don't often do that for me; any one that does gets a hearty endorsement.   It’s hard to present an example of the humor separate from the full story, but here goes.  Shorty and Marigold are two of the aged, and a doctor is looking in on Marigold.  “Before the doctor had finished, Shorty came in with coffee and biscuits on a bent silver tray.  He stayed a little longer than was altogether necessary, constantly glancing at Marigold in a way the doctor saw as indicating concern, and Marigold herself as pretended concern hiding utter indifference, but in fact amounted to pretended concern hiding hostile curiosity: if there was anything wrong with her more than being a snobbish old bitch eaten up with her own importance, he wanted to be one of the first to know about it.”  

Another example from the same visit: “Dr. Mainwaring recognized his patient’s departure from her habitual style, but was just as good at hiding the pity the departure made him feel as he was at hiding the irritation the habitual style made him feel.”  The syntax sometimes obscures the meaning, but re-reading a time or two reveals the punch.  It’s worth it.  Regarding the style of writing, I think Amis is poking fun at his own work in describing a book that Shorty is reading.  “The prose style was tortuous, elliptic, allusive, full of strange poeticisms; the dialogue, after the same fashion, was stuffed with obscurities and non-sequiturs....”  

At age 66, I’m still far from the state of decline of these characters, but the story calls me to see bits of myself in them, and them in me.  I think this empathy is an essential characteristic of good fiction, and Ending Up is good fiction.