Last Rites

Last Rites (1982) by Paul Spike Granada | ISBN: 0246117710 Condition: Good As sold by Crappy Old Books There are some titles that arrive with quiet subtlety, and there are others that stride in wearing black, carrying a candle, and looking as though they know several things about mortality that the rest of us have been doing our best to avoid. Last Rites is very much in the second camp. It is the sort of title that promises seriousness, doom, ceremony, and perhaps a little ecclesiastical unease, which is really all one can ask of a proper dramatic novel from the early 1980s. Paul Spike, blessed with an authorial name that already sounds faintly fictional, offers here a work steeped in the atmosphere of endings: moral endings, social endings, perhaps literal endings too. Even before one has turned a page, there is the agreeable suspicion that somebody is in trouble, somebody else is compromised, and all involved may be trying to maintain a threadbare appearance of dignity while events slide steadily toward unpleasantness. The phrase ?last rites? itself is wonderfully loaded. It speaks of finality, confession, judgement, ritual, and the formal recognition that things have gone rather further than one might have hoped. It is one of those expressions that carries a whole world inside it: religion, mortality, guilt, the theatre of death, and that very human desire to put some kind of order around chaos just as the lights are beginning to go out. Any novel borrowing such a title is clearly not intending to spend too much time on cheerful village fêtes. And yet books like this often derive much of their power not from melodrama alone, but from the steady, intelligent examination of the people caught inside it. The best darker fiction allows characters to reveal themselves under pressure: loyalties fray, motives become muddy, private failings move into public view, and everyone discovers that life is rather less tidy than the official version. One imagines Last Rites inhabiting precisely that territory, where the respectable surface starts to crack and the truth emerges wearing a tired expression. Published by Granada in 1982, this edition comes from that very pleasing period when paperbacks often had just enough style and menace about them to look immediately at home on a train seat, a bedside table, or beside an ashtray in a room where someone was having a difficult decade. There is a certain vintage charm to novels of this era: serious enough to matter, commercial enough to grip, and written before every difficult emotion had to be translated into therapeutic language. There is also, naturally, a quiet irony in reading a second-hand copy of a book called Last Rites . The title suggests endings, but the book itself has persisted very nicely, surviving changing fashions, house clearances, and the gradual disappearance of the world that first produced it. It now returns, slightly seasoned by time, to provide fresh amusement or unease to a new reader. Books, unlike people, are often granted several afterlives. This copy is in good condition , meaning it has aged with more composure than many of us are likely to manage. It will show the expected signs of being read and kept, but remains sound, presentable, and entirely ready for another thoughtful encounter with whatever solemn, sardonic, or darkly human business lies within. A fine choice for readers who enjoy literary fiction with shadows in it, period paperbacks with atmosphere, or novels that sound as though they may involve conscience, mortality, and people making the sort of decisions best appreciated from a safe distance. Last Rites has the title of a warning, the feel of a relic, and the enduring appeal of a book that seems likely to know something grimly interesting about the human condition.…