A note

From a novel I'm currently reading: "Six months later, when he was dead, I knew that life had been unfair to him.'' These lines were written in the eighties, but could have been written at any time in the past fifty years. They are the kind that make you want to say: what, you don't think that death can be the sole subject of a sentence? That the only way you can work in a (major) character's death is by referring to it in a sub-clause? The goal of such sentences is to avoid a certain sentimentality; but in doing so they lapse unavoidably into mannerism. Death is sentimental, and to pretend otherwise is to be a sophist, and a self-consciously literary one at that. Hollinghurst, as usual, is instructive when it comes to dealing with death:

It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road; it was the six liter Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tires of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.

[Later, at the funeral:]

I tried to sing, but was voiceless with tears, glancing forward to the awful box, which held what was left of my friend for the little while before we burnt him again.