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You are here: Home > Forum > A Place of Safety > Literary Merit > Blessed Be the Merciful
Blessed Be the Merciful  [message #78212] Fri, 03 December 2021 20:00 Go to next message
timmy

Has no life at all
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13739



I am often surprised when substantial tales like Blessed Be the Merciful pass by without a comment. I wonder if that's because Rafael Henry's whimsies are closer to reality than we realise?



Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
Re: Blessed Be the Merciful  [message #78213 is a reply to message #78212] Fri, 03 December 2021 21:26 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Teddy is currently offline  Teddy

Really getting into it
Location: USA
Registered: October 2006
Messages: 484



I just finished this tale. I loved it throughout, but felt rather let down in the end. To me the story seemed to just fizzle and sigh to an indeterminate conclusion, not unlike real life, as you say. The thing is, I don't read in order to validate my own indeterminate existense, such as it sometimes is. My reading of fiction is a means of seeking happy endings and known, pleasing results, so when a tale like this comes along that fails in that expectation I will generally stop and evaluate why. It's a good way of self checking, so in that regard the author may have accomplished his intended purpose. Sill, I realize this may be a phenomenon of my own and not a reflection on the auhor. Rafael Henry's stories have been and will continue to be ones I look forward to reading.



“There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.” - Terry Pratchett
Re: Blessed Be the Merciful  [message #78226 is a reply to message #78213] Sun, 09 January 2022 12:18 Go to previous message
Raphael is currently offline  Raphael

Getting started
Location: uk
Registered: September 2020
Messages: 1



A few thoughts, for what they are worth. I have personally found story endings problematic. I think this might be a more common issue than one thinks. I have watched several tv shows that promise well and then fizzle out to not much. I never know the ending when I start, in fact the whole story develops organically as one tries hard not to introduce yet another character! Again, I ponder possible endings way before I think I've stretched a story to ther limit. In naother creative field a dabble in, I find exactly the same. The piece is deliberately a jumble, a miasma of marks, and grsadually I hope to make sense of it. The 'ending' comes when I have nothing else to say. The 'process' as artists call it, is what it's all about, rather than the 'ending'. For me, just like visual art, knowing the ending would kill the pleasure of the process.......more like building a wall where the outcome is pre-ordained.
I try to conceive a positive ending, but with reservations that might reflect real life. When Sorin arrives at the airport from Bucharest, there is hope in his heart, as in mine, for him. We can't know how he will afre in life, but we have hope for him.
As an aside, I read recently a book by Joanna Harris.......'Blue eyed boy'......and if you work out the ending of that, after 500 or more pages [I read them all, some paragraphs several times] you are a better man than I. Never mind, I love her use of our language. 



RH
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