The End of Nightwork

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The Kourists, when you read about them (I’ll leave that for you to do rather than go into detail) set up an environment in which they and Pol’s condition (explained in the blurb) can bounce ideas around. Now in his early 30s, married to teacher Caroline and living in Kilburn with their young son, Jesse, Pol still has the appearance of a sprightly 23-year-old. At the toughest moments in the voyage, poor old Ishmael goes back and back to Elijah’s gnomic caution. Because they are so like us – the readers of the books – and so unlike us at the same time, prophets are uncanny and scary.

The details of his sudden teenage transformation are startling: “They had to shave me every day, because the beard and body hair growth was so rapid it was getting in the way of the doctors who were trying to operate on me … They were trying to stop my head from growing too quickly. Having said that I would not necessarily say that it will be one of the best as I felt that the myriad of adjacent-ish ideas in it failed to completely coalesce by the end in the way that much of the novel seemed to promise. As the seas rose, Playfere believed, all of the nations of the world would converge on these islands, would duke it out in an epic battle, the winners of which would be revealed by providence to be the long-lost tribes of Israel, borne on eagles’ wings to a place of greater safety to enjoy the diversions of the walled pleasure gardens of the new Jerusalem, the walls of which would be built against the wall-battering western winds.

Pol has a condition which means he stays outwardly the same age until suddenly he can age many years at once. Caroline encourages Pol because she is in awe of his intellect and thinks he is going to become “a literary sensation” by writing a book about Playfere. I like to think future-Jane is beaming these warnings back to past-Jane rather as Bill and Ted visit their past selves in Excellent Adventure. Alison Hart – a medium and survivor of childhood abuse – lives between worlds, between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, between the astral plane and Aldershot.

In one he is killed by a venomous snake and at the same time has a realisation: “I was not meant to die like this. And despite the novel’s complex philosophical and theological underpinning, its characters are always vividly alive. The family of José Arcadio Buendía, living in the isolated town of Macondo, are visited by the mysterious Melquiades.More often than not, the way that it works is that human beings come to despise prophets, just as you might come to despise someone who has read the story of your life and keeps trying to tell you about it while you’re in the middle of trying to live it. But then, this is a debut novel and, as a debut novel, it’s very clever and full of interesting writing and ideas. Pol’s facial hair grows at an uncontrollable speed and, when he is admitted to hospital, he can’t be treated on the children’s ward. Relating to this tension between youth and old age, he wishes to engage with the movement but externally he is the enemy – an old man. The prophet at the heart of Tressell’s masterpiece is Frank, a socialist agitator who spends most of the novel trying and failing to rouse the slumbering lions of labour.

Pols life fits and starts against the backdrop of his obsession with Puritan prophet, Bartholomew Playfere who wrote obscure works prophesying the end of the world.Along with Playfere’s prophecies, their Cassandra voices also provide Pol with meaning: “Because of the pauperisation and disfranchisement of the young by the old … the time for revolution and the restoration of the youth right is nigh. Her rise, he fantasises, would transform the way people perceive his “history of doing nothing of note”.