A group of disgruntled septuagenarians prepare for their final days in
this dark and "very funny" English novel about death and the
inevitability of growing old (The Observer)
Everyone wants a comfortable place to die, and Kingsley Amis's
characters have found it in Tuppeny-happeny Cottage, where assorted
septuagenarians have come together to see one another out the door of
life. There's grotesque Adela, whose sole passion is her cheapness; her
brother Brigadier Bernard Bastable, always strategizing a new retreat to
the bathroom before sallying forth to play some especially nasty
practical joke; Shorty, the servant, who years ago had a fling with the
brigadier in the barracks and now organizes his day around a trail of
hidden bottles; George Zeyer, the distinguished professor of history,
bedridden and helpless to articulate his still-coherent thoughts; and
Marigold, who slowly but surely is forgetting it all.
And now it is Christmas. Children and grandchildren are coming to visit
their ailing elders. They don't know what lies in store before the story
ends. None of us do.
Ending Up is a grimly hilarious dance of death, full of bickering,
bitching, backstabbing, drinking (of course), and idiocy of all sorts.
It is a book about dying people and about a dying England, clinging to
its memories of greatness as it succumbs to terminal decay.
