The End of Nightwork

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While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. So I wish that what felt expandable in the story had been replaced by more details about mythology, philosophy, and more existential ponderings diving into the main character's condition. From the cover I definitely expected more of the seventeenth-century prophet stuff, but what you do get from The End of Nightwork is something more modern-focused, thinking about recent history and interpersonal relationships and the ways in which age in important in current society.

That and Pol’s obsessive interest in the writings of an obscure seventeenth-century Puritan prophet, Bartholomew Playfere, and his premonitions of ecological disaster and the end of the world. Pol describes the difficult marriage between his German father and Irish mother and his obsession with 17th-century apocalyptic prophet Bartholomew Playfere. It ends, however, with a remarkably eschatological epilogue: “Mankind … is at last looking upward to the light… that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism. Past, present and future; radioactive mutants, baseball, the Harlem River and the four horses of the apocalypse jostle each other for room in her effortlessly baroque sentences. Standing in the presence of God, he sees “bound up with love together in one volume, what through the universe in leaves is scattered”.

It's an odd conspiracy theory that seems to owe more to Pizzagate and Q-Anon and, in the UK, the fantasies of Carl Beech and the ill-fated Operation Midland, than, say, to Climate XR, but with obvious links to Pol's own condition, mentally still young but, by the novel's end, elderly, and labelled by Kourist's as a 'Hoarist'.

That in itself would be more than enough plot, but on top of this are a string of well sketched generational relationships – between Pol and his estranged father, ageing Mother and carer Sister, between Caroline and her strong willed parents and between Pol/Caroline and their son Jesse (to whom the book is addressed) as well as a lively relationship between Pol and Caroline – family dynamics written in a lively and entertaining style with sharp dialogue which could I think easily suffice for an interesting TV sitcom series. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict - father against son, mother against daughter - that echoes Playfere's own prophecies. The first party narrator of the book Pol(onius) was suspected up to the age of thirteen as suffering from delayed development/late onset puberty from He Hakari Neke syndrome whereby he suffered at age 13 a heterochronous shock – undergoing physical development that would normally take place between say 12 and 22 in just a few days.At its centre is the tender relationship between Pol and his long-suffering wife, and with their son, to whom parts of the novel are intimately addressed. He works as a tutor to Cynthia, a young disabled artist and activist, and she inspires his increasing fascination with a present-day movement, the Kourists, whose manifesto of intergenerational conflict is refined and discussed on Reddit.

Testament to the quality of the prose is how lines of seemingly little consequence can resonate unexpectedly. Nevertheless, an intriguing debut and one which captures something of the confused times in which we live (the lack of resolution and satisfactory narrative resolution being itself symbolic) while implicitly observing that societal chaos, generational conflict and predictions of imminent catastrophe are far from new.

A man with a rare (indeed, fictional) condition that messes up his physical ageing becomes obsessed with a seventeenth-century prophet of doom named Bartholomew Playfere, and with a growing social justice movement among young people that sees all of history as a generational war between young and old. Rapturous, disruptive and quietly, complexly devastating, The End of Nightwork combines satire, elegy and fantastic portraiture to thrilling effect.