ALL’S WELL that ends well. And if all doesn’t end well, it should be forced to. This is the conclusion of a new survey for World Book Day, which found that most readers would far rather read a novel that ends happily ever after.
Pride and Prejudice was voted the happiest ending in literature, followed by
To Kill a Mockingbird and
Jane Eyre.
Only one in fifty readers, it seems, likes to be left tearful at the last page, so the survey also asked which unhappy endings readers would most like to change: Tess of the D’Urbervilles was a clear winner, with readers demanding clemency more than a century after Thomas Hardy sent his tragic heroine to her death. It was also felt that the endings of Wuthering Heights, 1984 and Gone with the Wind were all too depressing, and should be perked up.
In that spirit, therefore, I have begun rewriting great literature to bring it into line with popular sentiment. I, for one, have always found the opening line of Anna Karenina rather a downer. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
When you read that, you just know things are going to go off the rails or, more precisely, on them. Here is something a little more upbeat: “Happy families are just lovely; unhappy families are all the same, and tend to bang on about it.”
Madame Bovary could also do with some cheering up. How about this: Emma marries Charles, a terrifically entertaining and virile country doctor, they have eight children, someone invents Prozac, Emma buys an Aga and wins first prize for home baking at Yonville agricultural fair.
Why stop there? Macbeth is much too depressing. In my version the gentle, unassuming and monosyllabic thane settles down at Cawdor, where Lady Macbeth develops a profitable line in soap that leaves the hands spotless. Hamlet finds a shrink, marries Ophelia and goes into insurance. In the revised A Farewell to Arms, Catherine has a fat and healthy baby, and she and Henry establish a successful pacifist ski resort in the Alps.
Godot finally turns up.
And since we are making unhappy endings cheerier, for the gloomy 2 per cent there are ways of rendering happy endings a little darker, starting with Jane Eyre: The original “My Edward and I, then, are happy” needs another clause “. . . or we would be, if that bloody Bertha hadn’t found the fire escape.”
Pride and Prejudice could be rendered less saccharine by introducing the scene where Darcy explains to Elizabeth that it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune still in want of a wife is obviously gay, so he is moving to Tangiers to live with Wickham.
Customised literature sounds barmy, but it has already started, and the sequels industry is booming. Margaret Mitchell insisted that Gone with the Wind ended where she ended it. But the public demanded that Rhett must be made to give a damn after all, so the Mitchell estate employed Alexandra Ripley to stage a reunion: Scarlett, published in 1991, recouped a $5 million advance in three months, and sold 2.2 million copies in hardback.
Even though Austen ended all her books with a definitive full stop, dozens of imitators have added sequels and prequels, new endings and new beginnings. There are sequels to Treasure Island, Kim, Lark Rise to Candleford and even Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. No one has yet written The Sisters Karamazov, but it is only a matter of time. Some of these attempts to expand on an existing work are better than the original, such as George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman canon, taking up where Tom Brown’s Schooldays left off. Most are embarrassing pastiche, but all testify to the way great fiction continues to run on in the imagination long after the last page.
Literature is constantly being refashioned, if not actually rewritten. The whole of Austen has recently been repackaged as chick-lit, complete with pastel covers and skinny women with handbags. So-called fanfiction is booming, on websites where amateur writers continue their favourite stories: the further adventures of the Darcys, the Hobbits, Sherlock Holmes and Captain Kirk. The Fanfic.net website has more than 200,000 Harry Potter stories that J. K. Rowling never wrote.
This huge wave of derivative literature is a homage to the contagious power of fiction; soon it may be generated by the push of a button. Mathematicians at Google have invented a new algorithm (how’s that for a gripping opening line?) that will soon be able to produce perfect instant translation. Within a given context of prose, they say, it is possible to work out mathematically the most appropriate translation for every word.
If computers can translate English into perfect French, then they can presumably translate English into perfect Shakespeare in the same way. Thus, in some distant future realm of literature, we may be able to feed, say, a work by Stephen King into your computer and then get the same story out, but as Shakespeare would have written it, at the other end.
No writer worth the name sets out to produce happy or unhappy endings, let alone seeks to alter existing literature to produce one or the other. It is not the mere happiness or unhappiness of fiction that grips us, but the questions it asks, the people and situations it creates, the complexity of emotions it stirs. Some of the greatest endings in literature are neither uplifting nor distressing, but inquiring. Bleak House finishes on an unwritten question mark: “even supposing —”. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is a climactic affirmation, “his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes”, that echoes long after the book is closed.
I am particularly fond of the last line of War and Peace, which, in its very stodginess, makes the rest of the book seem even more wonderful: “In the present case, it is as essential to surmount a consciousness of an unreal freedom and to recognise a dependence not perceived by our senses.”
We should not demand that a last line makes us either happy or sad, but thoughtful; it is this that ensures great literature lives, happily, ever after.
