The ending to ‘The Astrolabe’ remains unsatisfying. Usually I’m quite good at final scenes, but it occurs to me this is because they are often the first thing that comes to me, whereas with this I didn’t have an ending before I began.
I read Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West last night, and that clearly suffered from the same problem. I enjoyed the first three-quarters of it, and then it felt like he didn’t know where to go with it. So he tried a change of scenery, then it just fizzled out. I have mixed feelings about Mohsin Hamid. I have had a really irritating conversation with him, which shall forever colour my view of his writing, and I disliked The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I find him pompous and ponderous, and feel he holds forth in the typical style of a Pakistani man pwning the drawing room. He also loves big issues: he writes about Terrorism, about Refugees, about Globalisation, etc, but rarely has smaller, more interesting and insightful things to say about any of them. On the other hand, he can capture something very true in his writing, which is why I really enjoyed Moth Smoke, and most of Exit West, and I do recognise that my own irritation is mixed up with my not writing much, and certainly not successfully.