Endings

Every novelist must write about endings. A book ends. Series characters age and sometimes die. Poul Anderson writes superbly about endings in Mirkheim. That entire book, particularly its closing chapter, is a long farewell to the Polesotechnic League and to several much-loved characters - although the reader gets the best possible deal because all of these characters reappear and live once more in The Earth Book Of Stormgate.

I was reminded of this this evening when rereading the Epilogue of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Volume I. I try to read something non-blog-related late at night but there is often a connection. Mikael Blomkvist has spent a dramatic year in the fictional town of Hedestad but at last must collect his remaining few belongings and return home:

"He took the last train back to Stockholm."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), EPILOGUE, p. 532.

Of course, "the last train" just means the last train that day but it is also Blomkvist's last journey by train from Hedestad back to Stockholm where he will be based in Volumes II and III. Everything ends.

Poul Anderson's very first Time Patrol story ends:

"Everard climbed weakly aboard the hopper. And when he got off again, a decade had passed."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 6, p. 53.

He feels the weight of that decade. The series and Everard's Time Patrol career are beginning but something has ended. Everard has learned how the world works and thus has lost a kind of innocence. The loss of innocence (scroll down) is the consistent theme of the Time Patrol series.