The End of the Alphabet

I never would read skinny books as a kid and so I was at first chagrined at how embarrassingly slight C.S. Richardson's book The End of the Alphabet proved to be. That it turns out to be about the death of a man, or rather, about his last bit of life, was somehow both sad and appropriate. Sad that the tail end of a life could be neatly encapsulated in a mere 119 smallish pages. Appropriate because dying is not something you want dragged out. I didn't mind the anemic size of the book once I began to read.

Ambrose Zephyr, at 50, is suddenly dying of some undisclosed and vague illness. He and his wife Zipper Ashkenazis (yes, yes, there's a lot of play on the alphabet. Obviously.) embark on a month-long tour of last places to see, in a roughly alphabetical order. A is for Amsterdam, H is for Haifa sort of thing. Things, of course, don't go quite as planned. After all, just because you are "given" a month to live, doesn't mean you should plan a 30 day Grand Tour.

I love that Ambrose and Zipper seem to spend most of their travels doing separate things. That just seems like a normal couple thing to do, once you've been together, childless for as long as they have. Ambrose turns out to be a mostly solitary man and Zipper is too sad at her impending loss to put up with his carefully rationed conversation (yes, ironically). They bicker, they explore, they share their findings (sometimes). This seems a gentle way to die. There's no talk of money, expense, disappointment in what they see (though their route was chosen carefully). They get tired and dirty, but nothing like real travel can be. It's an almost idealized view of the Grand Tour. Oh, except for the dying part.

In many ways, The End of the Alphabet is a fairy tale. It isn't really until close to the end of the book, that we even get much sense of the time period in which it takes place. It's clear that it's post-war, James Bond is mentioned at last, and then a reference to the 70s, but Ambrose and Zipper are both old-fashioned enough that it felt as though the story could take place any time between 1920 and present day, with a slight edge given to the late 1950s. Everything seems so orderly and elegant in this book. It seems that dying grandly (though discreetly--the characters are British, after all) is the perfect way to go.