Writing a last book

There is always the temptation to try and "finish" notes and drafts that an author has left behind

When a well-loved writer dies, we don’t just mourn her passing; we mourn, also, the books she will never write. This isn’t just true for those who died too young, or with just one or two books to their name: P G Wodehouse may have died in his nineties, having written a novel for every year of his life — but even so one wonders whether or not, had he been granted another year or so, we might have been given one more look at Blandings Castle or perhaps at Psmith.

This is particularly true for those, like Wodehouse, who have a created a world of their own that nobody else could replicate, or characters who are unique. When they die, that world dies with them, and so do their characters; we can mourn and celebrate an authors’ completed life, but can we mourn characters that will no longer live, but have not died?

Some writers understand this, and plan. They leave behind a single book to be published posthumously that ties things together, or leaves you with a feeling of completion. Agatha Christie did something similar, writing in the 1940s a “last” book featuring Hercule Poirot, Curtain, which she took out of the vaults and published as she felt her life drawing to a close.

There is always the temptation to try and “finish” the notes and drafts that an author has left behind – a temptation which is strongest when the writer in question is commercially enormously successful, or when her world is one which readers are unwilling to give up. Sometimes, this is an enormously successful enterprise. The best case, perhaps, is J R R Tolkien, when all the ingredients came together: A writer who left voluminous, detailed notes, sketches, and fully-fleshed out sections of a complete mythology; an editor (his son, Christopher Tolkien), who was more than capable of reconstructing the writer’s intent; and an audience that would never be tired of stories from Middle-Earth. The Silmarillion was put together in the 1970s by Christopher Tolkien after his father’s death, with assistance from the brilliant Canadian fantasist Guy Gavriel Kay; it was an enormous task, which required bringing together notes that had been scribbled as early as during the First World War. It was inconsistent and clearly not written by J R R himself, but it felt close enough in style and purpose.

It is even easier to do this when the author in question does not have – and let me be charitable here – a distinctive style. Consider Micro, left unfinished by Michael Crichton when he died in 2008, and completed by the science journalist Richard Preston. Crichton’s books are old-fashioned, high-concept thrillers which prioritise plot and cutting-edge science over style. Martin Amis, in a famously scathing review of the sequel to Jurassic Park, said Crichton was “bad at people and prose”, noting in particular the “thrashed and downtrodden adjectives”, and an “anti-talent for dramatic speech (‘Brace yourself, Sarah!’, ‘There’s no time to waste’, ‘There’s something funny about this island, Ian’)”. Through a “thick canopy of authorial padding”, Mr Amis complained of The Lost World, you could “see herds of clichés, roaming free”. This is, it turns out, not a difficult style to replicate; the Daily Telegraph review of Micro sniffed that “Richard Preston has done a fine job of maintaining the low standard. You can’t see the join.”

Sometimes, you can actually see the join. When the fantasy author Robert Jordan died in 2007, he had kept notes on how his mammoth, 15-book Wheel of Time series should conclude. These notes couldn’t have been brief; the Wheel of Time has about a million characters and two million subplots, all of which fans would demand to see resolved. Jordan had a distinctive, writerly, sometimes quite irritating authorial voice; but the man chosen to complete his books, Brandon Sanderson, decided against trying to replicate it. Thus the last three books of the series are written in Mr Sanderson’s far plainer style — right up to the very end and an epilogue which Jordan wrote himself and left behind. It’s quite startling to suddenly move from one style back to another; it feels a little bit like the “real” author’s resurrection.

Perhaps Christie’s solution, writing a final book well in advance, was the best. Many now believe she was burdened in her last years by Alzheimer’s, or some other disease associated with the symptoms of dementia; given she was among the most meticulous writers in history, it would be sad indeed if a last, tying-the-threads book did not have the perfection of all those that have gone before. Such is the case with Terry Pratchett’s last book, The Shepherd’s Crown. It does indeed bring his chronicles of Discworld to a close, and begins with the gentle, chapters-long death of one of his most beloved characters. But written well after what Sir Terry called his “embuggerance” – his Alzheimer’s – had begun to take hold, it doesn’t have the spark, the ironic distance, and the multiple layers, of other 40 Discworld books. But it has all his humanism, and all his angry determination that the world should get better, one person at a time. I can’t complain that he wrote it, and I won’t complain that the publishers put it out as is. Even an unsatisfactory last book is, in actual fact, satisfying.