Books with Fantastic Endings

Happy birthday to Pbird over at howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com...

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt asks for books with "fantastic" endings.

Books where an ending that would have happened in a fantasy, not in a realistic story, is tacked on to  a story? There are too many of those, especially in the romance genre. They live happily after? Those two? So, they get married, she enjoys his body for the week or so it takes for the novelty to fade enough for her to notice his arrogance and stupidity and so on, and right away he dies and leaves her as his super-rich relative's only heir? Isn't that the only way anyone could be happy with that man?

Then there are the series where the ending of each novel ignores the passing of time. If the series sold well enough the main characters, who seem usually to be amateur detectives, stay so busy solving mysteries that they forget to age. Dorothy Sayers may have been unique in trying to have Peter Wimsey and Dorothy Vane not only age naturally, but mature in a way that allows them to be happy together even though neither of them was fit for anyone else to live with when they met. It worked for her but it was too ambitious a feat of writing to have given any ideas to the sagas of characters like Miss Marple, who seemed to stay about sixty years old for about sixty years, a mystery all middle-aged people would like to solve, or Nancy Drew, who never found time to grow up, never married, never voted, never earned a degree, and never did a grown-up job...

An egregious example that I remember not quite believing, but loving, when I was seven to ten years old, is the end of My Friend Flicka. In real life, Mary O'Hara later wrote, there was a lovable little filly, not the eye-catching pale red one but a great pet for a teenager, who got tangled up in barbed wire and had a nasty infection that just kept getting worse. It was about 1930; antibiotics weren't available. So the animal died, of course. She became too weak to stand up, collapsed into a stream while taking a drink, and never got up again. But in the novel, of course, the cold clean water washed her wounds and the sweet little boy sat in the cold water with her all night. End of chapter. And even the seven-year-old reader thinks, "Well, they died together, then," but there's one more chapter about how they both survived. The boy, who'd been doing badly at school anyway, had to (or got to) miss another year with pneumonia but, when he was allowed to bundle up and go out, he and Flicka ran to meet each other with mutual whinnies of joy.

Mary O'Hara wrote that people she knew said, "The filly died, of course," and yes, of course she did. In real life no human came close to dying with her. But she should have lived! So the novel ends with what people in a similar situation wished had happened, not what did happen. 

I had the wonderful experience of reading Wyoming Summer,  the still-fictionalized, condensed, animal-focussed version of the diaries out of which My Friend Flicka was made, while living near a friendly Thoroughbred mare who was, in real life, recovering from an encounter with barbed wire. In the 1980s Flicka would have recovered without any melodramatic fantasy about anyone haivng to offer his life as a sacrifice for hers, and recover his life by a miracle that prefigures the Christian Gospel. In the 1930s she would have died.

I've never been sure about Sounder. The dog's story is about how he belongs to a man. He is a hound, known for baying loudly while hunting for game. While his man is away he looks after the man's son. They share adventures, and the dog seems to love the son, but he doesn't bay. Only when his man comes home does he bay again.

"And then he dies?" my husband asked, hearing the synopsis.

"The book says he hunted with them again until 'the boy' grew up and moved out."

"Children's story," my husband said. "In a novel for adults he would have died."

The book was based on a story someone else told William Armstrong; we'll never know how long the real dog lived.

The ultimate example of a fantastic ending has to be the ending of the five-book series that started with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The series  is a parody of favorite science fiction tropes, especially the idea that each of the different ways anything turns out might be the one that really happens in each of an infinite number of possible universes. The eponyous restaurant exists to exploit this (now known to be a fact) of physics. Each evening it takes diners into a universe that's ending and back into the one where they're dining. When they visit the main characters in the story meet a rock star who's spending a year dead for tax reasons, which allows him to seem less than half alive in the restaurant, like the departed souls consulted by Spiritualists. They see a religious group who have spent several evenings in the restaurant, waiting for the return of their prophet; when our characters get there, they happen to go into the universe where the prophet returns. 

So, how does this story end? Do the characters go back to their home worlds and live ordinary lives? Do they keep rocketing around the "multiverse" in interdimensional spaceships? The answer is, of course, that in the universes this science fiction postulate creates, there are universes where they do each and all of the things they might do. There's an infinite number of possible endings, two or three of which are described in the books.

That fantastic fantasy ending seems just right for a fantastic fantasy story.