Loose Ends by Ann Somerville – review
Title: Loose Ends
Author: Ann Somerville
Genre: Contemporary Romance
URL: Ann Somerville’s fiction
Price: Free
Warnings: Explicit m/m
Summary: When Mark found he was dying, his last wish was to make sure that he’d left nothing for his husband, Christopher, to worry about. But Christopher discovers that his beloved hasn’t quite tied up all the loose ends.
My review: If you’re a fan of Ann Somerville’s Darshian or Pindone fantasies (or her alien felines), her new novella, “Loose Ends,” might surprise you.
On the other hand, if you’ve come to expect psychologically nuanced, boldly imagined stories from Somerville’s site, you won’t be surprised at all.
There’s very little flash in “Loose Ends,” either in the writing or in the story line. But the simple, linear plot, the contemporary story of a middle-aged man’s struggle through grief and into a new love, is deceptively straightforward.
Somerville palpably conveys the numbness and confusion of Christopher’s grieving for Mark, his longtime lover, without maudlin sentimentality. His character is compelling, and I appreciated its development throughout the story, as it’s not keyed slavishly to any “stages of grief” psychology but rather complicated by the appearance of the “loose ends” of the title. Those loose ends distract Chris from his grieving process—it’s easy to sympathize with the temptation to evade grief—and that distraction proves the prime mover of the plot later in the story, when Chris’s denial threatens to destroy the fragile new happiness he crafts.
Another impressive aspect of the story is that elements other than character are brought deftly into service of the largely interior plot. For example, the settings in the story, especially Christopher’s Hampstead house and the Australian seaside, are conveyed impressionistically. Through Somerville’s use of small, telling details, how the house feels to Chris becomes a bellwether for his emotional state. This ambitious literary device is employed to good effect throughout the story.
In a tale whose important action takes place within the minds and hearts of its principal characters, the appearance of external threats to their development and resolution came as an unwelcome shock. This was especially true because the two-dimensional secondary characters who act as catalysts for the story’s climax, tried my patience—if our heroes were going to go through hell, let them suffer under the lash of a worthy devil, at least. Somerville handles the action and emotion to that point with such sublime delicacy that I was disappointed when relatively conventional conflicts threatened to interrupt the more interior trajectory of the plot itself. By the same token, the final few pages use a wrapping-up device that distances us from the principal characters, which is a shame because, on the whole, we’ve been swept along by their trials and want to finish the story the same way: right inside their heads, feeling their emotions every step of the way. Not getting that left me vaguely disappointed, but that is more a tribute to Ann Somerville writing at her best than it is a complaint when she slips under her own high bar.
While these flaws detract, they do not destroy the satisfaction of the dénouement, which relies once again on the psychological development of the characters for its action and outcome. Somerville’s decisions on behalf of her characters with respect to the resolution of the plot were not the easy ones, but they were the right ones, and the well-modulated happy ending is both well-earned by the characters and memorable for readers.
Definitely recommended.
