THE NEVER-ENDING TASK

THE NEVER-ENDING TASK

The chair adjusted. The desk clear. The light angled. The bottle opened. The glass filled just enough.

Before the first words appear, the eyes closed and the fictional world surveyed. Not from too high. Not from too far. Individuals, not types. Representative, but not ciphers. Wide-ranging, but inter-related. Not just practically. That would be contrivance. Not just metaphorically. That would be art for art’s sake. Somewhere in between.

All ages. All countries. All ethnicities. All genders. And everyone with something uniquely personal about them. All professions, too. And the retired. And the young. Who want to be this, or want to be that, even though they won’t.

And somewhere on the edge, a writer. Only natural. Lots of writers. Writers of romance. Writers of thrillers. Writers about nature. Writers about engineering. Writers of history. Writers of polemic masquerading as history. So many writers about so many things.

Might it, in fact, be easier to conflate the writers with all the other characters in the novel? To outsource some of it? So, instead of having to invent a plot-framework to bring all these disparate individuals into some sort of relationship with one another, you just create these writers, having due regard to a certain spread of age, location, ethnicity, gender, language and so on, and then these writers produce an increased spread with the characters in their works, and they do all the describing and donkey-work, and if they’re historians or writers of historical fiction or science fiction, or, and think about this possibility, they’re actually writing in the past, and they just happen be together because they’re side by side on the shelves in some library, or in someone’s personal collection, then they give the temporal spread as well…

And all you have to do is cut and paste [as it were], juxtapose individual segments, deciding where to end and where to start, of course, and how to indicate which one’s which, which is something you should probably do, unless you want to create complete confusion, which may, of course, be part of your overall plan, if you have a plan, if a plan is what you want, or at least the illusion of a plan, or the plan of an illusion, because, after all, that’s what it will be, by and large, to some extent, all in all, taking everything together: one colossal illusion.

The whole world. In one book. Wow. Wow!

What an idea. It’s a wonder nobody’s thought of it before. A life’s work. Several lives’ work, if you’re being realistic. Some kind of co-operative? With the dead? Perhaps. If they’re out of copyright. Maybe an algorithm. Human input for the parameters. And human decisions at crucial points. The artistic element. Imaginative selection.

And among the writers, just to be completist about the possibilities, one who’s had the idea that you’ve just had. Just one? Or one from each age-bracket, gender, ethnicity…

Fill the glass. Open another bottle. Chair pushed back. Light off.

Mike Rogers