The End of Nightwork

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Then I remembered that I had read something by Cottrell-Boyce in a recent edition of Granta magazine and, on checking, I realised that what I had read was the first chapter of this book.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton/the Guardian ‘What misery to be wise’ … Greg Hicks as Tiresias in The Oedipus Plays by Sophocles at the National Theatre in 1996. At 13, Pol finds he has undergone a “heterochronous shock”, ageing him 10 years overnight – and leaving him there. Meanwhile, Jesse begins acting out at school and Pol’s mother’s dementia and his own increasingly vivid dreams lead him to re-examine the knotty dynamics of his family. I kept turning it over in my mind after I had finished reading it, and the more I thought about it, the more I saw.I think anyone reading it will find themselves both entertained and intrigued, and I very much look forward to what the author does next. But with his condition dormant, Pol and his wife Caroline manage to live an ordinary life in London. De observaties die gratuit lijken en waarvan een aantal dat ook zijn, ook al komen sommige details verderop in de roman terug. Yet when Pol undergoes a second heterochronous leap, as his doctors had promised, finding himself in the body of a 70-year-old man, the book takes off. Told to his son in second person, his story of life with his wife Caroline – "your" mother – would be a fairly recognisable one (for all the ambivalence that such a word implies) were it not for its esoteric poles.

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'. He also feels a strange kinship when he discovers there are gaps in the prophet’s history: “His life story seemed to leap from his childhood to … his ill-advised pilgrimage to the island where he and his followers lived out the rest of their lives awaiting the coming apocalypse. In 1653 he published The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, in which he described the precise location of the battle of Armageddon as taking place not in the Holy Land but in the islands off the coast of Connemara. The story of Pol (Polonius) and his family is indeed told in a way that is refreshing to read: well observed, clever dialogue (the girls in this book get some great lines!If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

Associate publishing director Jason Arthur acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Matthew Marland at RCW in a three-way auction. According to Playfere’s pamphlet The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, the end of the world will begin not in the Holy Land but on an island off the coast of Connemara. I’m conflicted because reading the book was an enjoyable experience but I can’t help feeling at the end that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. 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.This debut novel glints with so many eye-catchingly surreal ideas — taking in invented historical figures, arcane medicine, absurdist politics, and vast conspiracies — that it promises all the high jinks of a Thomas Pynchon romp. The leader of this popular movement predicts an imminent inter-generational conflict - father against son, mother against daughter - that echoes Playfere's own prophecies. So that the whole World seems to be on Fire before its time and the birds of the air will gather in the darkling sky and will tear out the eyes of the slaves of Sathan. But when he sees his father, Jacob, the “inspired Heresiarch”, “stricken by God’s fire” while sitting on “an enormous china chamberpot”, he understands “the divine anger of saintly men”.

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. When Pol learns about a new youth movement about the tension between the young and the old, he's intrigued, but any stress in his life could cause his condition to trigger. 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.Pol attempts to live an ordinary life with his wife and son but against the backdrop of environmental collapse, the rise of a youth cult who have all the hallmarks of Playfere's prophecies about the young turning on their parents and his increasingly fractured family life, it's hard to keep a sense of what's real. But with his condition dormant, Pol and his wife Caroline manage to live an ordinary life in Kilburn. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them. The couple spend their honeymoon on the small Irish island which Playfere said would be the only place where you could survive the apocalypse. It is never explained why a father would want to feel sorry for his son, but eccentricity is a family trait.