Claire North's The End of the Day follows Charlie who is an average British man, completely normal in every aspect, apart from the fact that his boss is Death. Charlie is the harbinger - the one who goes before death - and this book takes us through 4-5 years of Charlie at his "job". For anyone who has read Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens or Neil Gaiman's American Gods, the tone will probably sound familiar. The story winds through all the "snapshots" of the people Charlie meets as he goes about fulfilling his duties as a harbinger.
Almost as fascinating as the people's stories and lives were that Charlie meets, were the varied way people reacted to Charlie. For the most part, he stuck to the truth when questioned about who he was and what he was doing. "I'm the harbinger of death." Oh, okay, no problem, sir. Welcome to our city.
At first, you think this is going to be a collection of almost short stories where you get to meet these people and see how they respond to the possibility that they're going to die soon (or heed the warning - Charlie doesn't always show up as a promise of death, sometimes he's just a warning). Then there are glimpses that some of these stories might be connected, and there's something larger happening. And Charlie - who really starts off just wanting to do his job and be a good employee - cannot help but be affected in profound ways by some of the beauty (and ugliness) of humanity he is bound to witness. I could see this being a novel that would benefit from re-reading because I'm sure there are many more clues and "Easter eggs" that I missed.
Don't be fooled into thinking Charlie is the only one affected by these stories. Some of the people in here are still with me, even though it's been nearly a week since I finished the book. Like the woman who died, and since she was the last person on the planet who spoke her native tongue, took her language with her. Or the lesbian comedian in Africa whose life on the stage was as bright as the terror of her personal life was dark. And Sven, in the land of ice....I just don't think I will ever be the same after reading about him. Then the middle-eastern freedom fighter who began life wanting only to be a poet. I love this quote from him:
"Until you have not been free, you cannot understand what freedom means."
This book wasn't perfect, and I really struggled with some of the choices Claire North made in telling her story. Every other chapter is nothing more than a litany of dialogue lines with no speech tags, and no hint as to who is speaking. Imagine if you had a radio that could tune in to every conversation around the world and you were just channel-surfing. That's what it was like reading, and I didn't understand the point to those sections; by the last third of the book, I was just skipping over them.
Also, when Charlie speaks with the people in his personal life, he speaks in broken or unfinished sentences, and it got really annoying after a while. Granted, everyone does that occasionally, but it seemed to be the way he spoke all the time, like he wasn't capable of finishing a single thought. Maybe that's what made him such a good harbinger, since part of his job required being a good listener. Either way, it definitely didn't work for me.
What DID work for me, were the gifts.
Each person Death sends Charlie to visit, receives a gift. The gift is selected by Death, and Charlie's task is to find the gift and present it to that person. Charlie never knows the meaning or significance behind the gift, but a lot of the times, the recipient does; and those answers were enjoyable to discover along with Charlie. Charlie's own unique sense of humor was sometimes refreshing, and other times baffling, but it kept me reading on to get more, and I saw her personality changing as we moved through the book. In the beginning, he mistakenly believes that since he works for Death, nothing bad can happen to him. As he finds himself in a situation that directly challenges that belief, his internal reflection shows us the pragmatic side of him that must have been a requirement for someone to do a job such as his.
Perhaps, if he was a more experienced kind of man, the kind of man who knew how to fire a gun or build a bomb out of glue and a tin of tomatoes, he'd have kept track of the seconds since his kidnapping, the turns of the car, orientating himself by some...
...some cunning technique...
...that he simply didn't know.
He was a stranger in a strange land, at the mercy of the strangers he met, and so far the strangers he'd met had all been kind, considerate, generous people, and tonight they'd kidnapped him at gunpoint, and all things considered, it had probably needed to happen some day.
Claire North is also the author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, a book that has been on my radar since its publication. I still plan to read that, as I enjoyed North's style and prose. I just hope the characters in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August are a bit better at conversation.
The End of the Day was published in hardcover April 4, 2017.
It will be released in trade paperback August 22, 2017
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