Ben Turnbull is 66 years old, living
near Boston, beside the sea, in 2020, after the destruction of the
Sino-American War. Government has disappeared. Entrepreneurs are
moving in to offer services, and are in turn being encroached upon by
corporations. The chaos in society is parallelled in the chaos of
Ben's golf game.
Ben is mostly retired from a financial
planning job, unhappily married to his second wife, remembering
countless flings and mistresses. He has adult children,
step-children, and grandchildren, a fact which seems to be related to
his neurotic anxiety about the distant future and distant galaxies.
He struggles to recover from a prostate operation. The only good
thing in his life seems to be a heightened awareness of the miracles
of nature which surround him. Like the black holes in space, there
appear to be a few holes in the cheese of his brain, leading him to
recall his time with St Paul and, later, as an inhabitant in an Irish
monastery during a Viking invasion. The "End of Time"
alluded to in the title is personal, cultural, planetary, cosmic.
While the journal entries which compose this novel are his attempt to
comprehend and control, time and time warps evade his pen.
Personally, I got that his mind is a
bit discombobulated and I did not really need all these words and
descriptions. I also got that he seems to be a man led, driven,
solely by lust and his own physical sensations and gratifications. His abstract scientific mental meanderings
are an unconvincing attempt to know the unknowable. Although the
dystopic vision of a post-apocalyptic planet does somehow ring true. And
in the final identification with nature still dominated by human
Old-Think, the narrator offers the reader a glimmer of hope that he
may have seen some light.
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