Alison, chance-met in regent Street – ‘ Oh, hello!’ – whom he had worked and flirted with, briefly and timidly, when? Ten, a dozen years earlier? When he had not known Marilyn was pregnant… But real anger, such as Martin had provoked when he made his fatal confession – that had been impossible to foresee. For recently, he fancied, he had become aware of an overview - a symptom of age, no doubt; his life presented to him as though by destiny, with an unnerving and unexpected shrug - ‘There you go then’ - dismissive, final.” I should note that when I refer to the City of London I am not talking about the whole of London, but a specific area in the East of the central district which has for centuries been the financial heart of the city, where numerous banks and financial institutions were once headquartered. It is an area which corresponds very closely to the old Roman city that lies several metres below the current street level. Descend to the basements of some modern buildings and you will find the long lost past hidden there.

But it was impossible to wholly forget the hotel room in which he and Alison had f**ked – there was no other word – surrounded by Empire-style furniture and gilt-framed fake engravings of botanical specimens. And how willingly they had pursued the preceding evening into mounting suggestiveness, as tawdry as it was alluring, there in the Polo Bat of the Westbury hotel. His common place talents – mathematics, doing well in interviews for jobs – were, he felt, so at odds with his soul. He was a poet manqué, he had told himself. From that, clearly, all else proceeded… Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops One of the most poignant moments in the novel comes when he is invited to the engagement party of his ex-wife, Marilyn, and the wealthy, superficial, but instinctively self-confident Thomas. Studying her from a distance, Martin notices that Marilyn looks different, but he cannot put his finger on what has changed. A moment later, however, he sees that, “She looked rich – that was it: not just well-off, in that tasteful yet bourgeois north London way, but noticeably wealthy. She was in transit… It was suddenly present in everything she did and wore; in her demeanour as much as her aura.”Then, as an aspiring member of hermetic communities to which he cannot possibly belong (his wife’s family, for example, whose mind games are defined by the belief that “it’s never enough… to win. Others must be seen to fail”), he is not so much rejected as politely ignored by the men and women whose power he is inherently incapable of sharing. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

It is this eagerness, this sense from “40 years ago” that “the road ahead seemed to draw us steadily on towards real life”, which pulls Martin down. Captivated by style (according to his one real friend, he is one of those for whom “atmosphere always atrophies action”) he slides into the hapless condition of perennial romantic, a boy from the suburbs whose ordinary bedroom becomes a “museum of himself”, a construct whose “tenebrous atmosphere of falling dusk and church choral music and cigarette smoke” forms the basis of a persona that is nowhere near robust enough for the world he is about to enter. For Martin his evening ends lying face down on the concourse of Liverpool Street Station, followed by the swiftly delivered diagnosis of needing open heart surgery. This forces him to rethink who and what he is. But fate has even more curved balls to throw. More unexpected directions for his life to take. A sadness pervades the final chapters. It gives Martin chance to reflect from his hospital bed on what might have been but for his transgression, which he describes in perfectly balanced tones: The second type puts the emphasis on algia, and does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is… ironic, fragmentary, and singular. [It] accepts (if it does not enjoy) the paradoxes of exile and displacement. Estrangement, both as an artistic device and as a way of life, is part and parcel of ironic nostalgia. That Unfinished Business is Bracewell’s first novel in more than two decades may say something about the state of British fiction but, whatever the reason for the hiatus, the book is a welcome return from a master of the form. In some ways, its concerns are familiar from Bracewell’s earlier work: Martin Knight, a middle-ranking office worker now in his late fifties, has reached a professional and personal impasse, having recently separated from his wife after a brief infidelity (to which he was foolish enough to confess).And here I am, Martin reasoned, and I don’t really know what my job is anymore…As for his “skill” – it had been known as so many things over the years; been in and out of fashion, regarded as both Saviour and Antichrist: logistics, IT, datamanagement, tech, systems analyst…Now it was everything and nothing, like most things. The end of this book felt unnecessarily tortuous to me (give the man a break), but overall I found this book to be perceptive and poetic, regardless of perhaps not being the target audience. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it. This book has some really beautiful language in it, and does a great job at examining those feelings and parts of life that we churn through unconsciously (one of my favourite types of writing). While short in length, this book isn’t one to inhale in a single sitting. I spent a lot of time chewing over every word, needing to take my time to digest it and re-read sentences again to feel the full impact. The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel’s climax stuns like a concussion – worse than that, because it’s not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming. The aftermath of the loss steers us towards a bruised diminuendo, and an affecting acceptance that for some it’s time to move on, or move out. “The former things had passed away.” But I suspect this Temps Perdu of a melancholy journeyman will reverberate long after the book is closed. He is perhaps best known for his 1997 collection, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie.

What Martin is experiencing here is the recognition of a simple, brutal fact: “the rich are rich, and we’re not”. Because owning the world is a serious vocation, the wealthy are interested only in those who play some part in maintaining that possession: “They sought only the company… of people who increased their status – who brought something to the table, as it were; be that best of all an aristocratic, old or famous name, or great wealth, glamour or personal beauty; at the very least – lowest entry level – a talent to amuse.” Martin, who possesses none of these attributes, is bound by his nature to be invisible among such elites. At the same time, he is unable to see past them – unlike his acquaintance, Basil, the man “educated by style”, who knows that it is pointless looking to them “for anything”.For an hour or so, he was suspended, weightless, in a pause in time that was meaningful and poetic and enabled him to see immense distances. He simply had to stay forever in this stilled floating moment, in which, everything was benign and comfortably significant.