UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life – work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement – his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?
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Reviews
I was won over by this quietly reflective gem of a novel about regret, ageing, and the memory of lost love
There is an elegance and mystery to Bracewell's writing as well as a sumptuous, slightly chilly delight in the sensuality and texture of things; clothes, food, drink, interiors. His prose evokes a world that is at once unknowable, beautiful and sad
The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback . . . The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel's climax stuns like a concussion - worse than that, because it's not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming
Unfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes - ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality - and celebrates beauty
Michael Bracewell is an extraordinary stylist who's able to summon whole eras with a few deft phrases. In Unfinished Business, his prose mastery of cultural codes and aesthetic textures is put to work on the most intimate kinds of hope and loss. As a novelist he dazzles, then breaks your heart, and I wish I knew how he pulls it off
What a poignant, quietly devastating novel, a meditation of loss in all its flavours and pains of late middle age with a Prufrock for our times at its heart
Michael Bracewell's masterpiece was worth the wait. Awash with luxury and regret, suffused with the pent-up emotion of The Great Gatsby and the style of a post-modern dandy, Bracewell delivers something magical
For me, Michael Bracewell, in edgy, elusive works, like Present Tense, Souvenir, and now Unfinished Business, has always been engaged in something very special. A spiritual adventure which embraces all things with huge curiosity, seems present throughout his work
This book has the instantly recognisable feel of a minor classic. Melancholic, reflective, it quietly and elegantly asks the big questions: what is a life for, exactly? What does it all amount to? A devastating portrait of a once dazzling life fading to grey
I gave up on Proust to read this - there are similarities - and didn't regret it. Not for a moment
This sense of innocence and wanting is what gives this eerie novel its power to move and frighten . . . Bracewell excels at this kind of shocked satire, of London's continuing grand delusions
This elegaic, understated story of a man cut adrift in London, haunted by the reality of his own decaying body, is an essay in fracturing memory, a compassionate and tender tale of searching for a better life as time runs short