Focused on Martin Knight, a London-based office worker with a job he no longer understands, Unfinished Business looks at a life unfulfilled and the physical and emotional effects of loneliness and modern coping mechanisms. Introduction to the Sotheby's catalogue for Damien Hirst's sale: Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, an introduction (2008)

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.

Summary

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: He is perhaps best known for his 1997 collection, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie. The underlying malaise of our time is an improperly diagnosed and so routinely untreated nostalgia. The most persuasive historian of this condition was Svetlana Boym, who identified two types of nostalgia. The first stresses nostos, or homecoming, and is “reconstructive and collective”:

Any feelings of bemusement may be attributed to the unpredictable rhythms of Bracewell’s narrative, its winding, sinuous convolutions a nod to the working of memory itself. The technique was on display in his previous book Souvenir, a jewelled memoir of London from 1979 to 1986. Even when an episode’s place in the larger scheme is obscure, Bracewell has an amazing gift for putting you in the room with his characters, nowhere more hauntingly than a late digression about a one-night stand that almost happened between Martin and his friend Hannah in a flat on Craven Street – a secretive Georgian terrace running alongside Charing Cross – whose freezing upstairs sitting room “felt as though they were camping out on a dark ridge, alone”. A Bracewellian scene, hung with shadows, murmurous with implication: in the years that followed, “neither of them discussed that evening”. But real anger, such as Martin had provoked when he made his fatal confession – that had been impossible to foresee. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my 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. 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”. 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… 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. 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.

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.” 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 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.Michael Bracewell (born 7 August 1958) is a British writer and novelist. He was born in London, and educated at the University of Nottingham, graduating in English and American Studies. 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.” 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… 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.

A comprehensive collection of Bracewell's essays can be found in The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art, edited by Doro Globus and published by Ridinghouse in 2012. [1]This is not to suggest an easy resolution, or any resolution at all, but Unfinished Business more than earns the right to take its reader this far into a further, subtler realm of estrangement. As it does, it reminds us that, in Bracewell’s hands, nostalgia is less a symptom of decadence than a source of illumination in dark times. 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. 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. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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).