BOOKS

Recently, I visited a second-hand bookshop and bought a book subtitled “30 Modern Australian Short Stories”, each written by a different author. Australians, as everyone knows, are an adventurous people, so I was looking forward to this exciting read. But what I got was a shock. I was shocked by how ambiguous the endings were. In the first story, a girl goes for a swim in dangerous waters. Does she escape the sea and return home? The story does not say; it kind of stops there. The next story by a different author ends in a similar ambiguous way. And the next and the next.  It seems that ending an otherwise interesting story in a depressingly ambiguous way is something English writers are particularly proud of.

It is all the fault of Charles Dickens. In his novel “Great Expectations,” he ends the book with the following paragraph. 'I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her'. Yes, the ending of Great Expectations is deliberately ambiguous, leaving the reader to ponder Pip and Estella's future relationship. While they part holding hands, Estella has just stated her desire to remain alone, and Pip has expressed his intention to remain a bachelor. This, combined with Pip's tendency to misinterpret situations, creates a sense of uncertainty about their future together.  Disappointed, I read a translation of a French novel and found that the French were ambiguous, not at the end but from the beginning to the end. Is it too much to ask for a book where the reader knows what happens to the characters in the end after taking the trouble to read the entire book?