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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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Fiction & Related items

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Michael Bracewell

New novel by Michael Bracewell.
"A wonderful, suble study of a lonely, heavy-drinking office worker... a quietly reflective gem of a novel about regret, ageing, and the memory of lost love." - The Independent

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?

Michael Bracewell is the author of six novels and two works of non-fiction including SAINT RACHEL, PERFECT TENSE, REMAKE/REMODEL and ENGLAND IS MINE.
His writing has been published in THE FABER BOOK OF POP and a selection of his writings on art and culture, THE SPACE BETWEEN was published in 2012.
He has written widely on modern and contemporary art, most notably about the work of Bridget Riley and Richard Hamilton on the occasion of recent exhibitions of their work at The National Gallery, London. Also on the art of Damien Hirst and Gilbert & George for the Tate Gallery, London.
His most recent publications include the Introduction to a new edition of Oscar Wilde's classic essay, 'The Critic As Artist'.

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Book Published 2023-01-19 by White Rabbit

Comments

A wonderful, suble study of a lonely, heavy-drinking office worker... a quietly reflective gem of a novel about regret, ageing, and the memory of lost love.

This elegaic, understated story of a man cut adrift in London, haunted by the reality of his own decaying body, is an essay in fracturing memory, a compassionate and tender tale of searching for a better life as time runs short.

Michael Bracewell is an extraordinary stylist who's able to summon whole eras with a few deft phrases. In Unfinished Business, his prose mastery of cultural codes and aesthetic textures is put to work on the most intimate kinds of hope and loss. As a novelist he dazzles, then breaks your heart, and I wish I knew how he pulls it off.

The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dearmlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particulary in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback...

What a poignant, quietly devastating novel, a meditation of loss in all its flavours and pains of late middle age with shades of Henry Green, with a Prufrock for our times at its heart, and a timely novel to be reading toward the end of the Wasteland's centenary too 'Under the brown fog of a winter dawn'.

I gave up on Proust to read this there are similarities and didn't regret it. Not for a moment.

There is an elegance and mystery to Bracewell's writing as well as a sumptuous, slightly chilly delight in the sensuality and texture of things; clothes, food, drink, interiors. His prose evokes a world that is at once unknowable, beautiful and sad.

For me, Michael Bracewell, in edgy, elusive works, like Present Tense, Souvenir, and now Unfinished Business, has always been engaged in something very special. Far from being a writer associated with popular culture, Bracewell elegantly and calmly, in a beautifully English way, probes and anatomizes the material culture around us in contemporary Britain. His careful observation of clothes, social mores, changes, music, social conjunctions, and cultural alteration, amounts to a sceptical, profound barometer of the material world. In that almost mystic way which Marx acknowledged, Bracewell is trying to sense-out material history, trying to locate simple 'truths,' in the plastic world around us. His characters, often Classic-Russian-like office workers - 'small men' - move beneath shadows vaster than us all; a spiritual adventure which embraces all things with huge curiosity, seems present throughout his work.

This book has the instantly recognisable feel of a minor classic. Melancholic, reflective, it quietly and elegantly asks the big questions: what is a life for, exactly? What does it all amount to? A devastating portrait of a once dazzling life fading to grey.

Michael Bracewell's masterpiece was worth the wait. Awash with luxury and regret, suffused with the pent-up emotion of The Great Gatsby and the style of a post-modern dandy, Bracewell delivers something magical, something almost beyond literature, a story as much felt as described. Unfinished Business is the what-might-have-been of all our lives. It is deeply centred in the details of the past five decades, suspended in a past which the author retrieves like a séance conducted with his own ghost. This vivid, lyrical book is coloured like rain, and it is stained with the decay of our age. In prose so exquisite and elegant that it will leave you breathless, it takes you by the hand and leads you into another world.