Masterpieces with Crap Endings

If it's to be considered a classic, you might have thought that a book would need to have a quality ending. But it's not true. As long as you've still got the reader hooked two thirds of the way through, it doesn't matter if you haven't actually worked out how to tie the whole thing together.

Here are a few unquestioned masterpieces where the muse scarpered just as the author was starting to wrap things up.

William Shakespeare - Hamlet

I've never understood why there aren't fits of laughter during Act 5 Scene 2 of Hamlet. Shakespeare warms us up with what is surely drugs humour:

'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do.
Woot weep, woot fight, woot fast, woot tear thyself,
Woot drink up eisel, eat a crocodile?

Anyway, having brooded intensely for months, Hamlet is about to kick it off with evil King Claudius and his posse. The result is the expiration of most of the cast in a comedy Deathathon. Not only is there a poison dagger but also a poisoned cup being passed around between unwitting drinkers; a device rather cruelly lampooned by Danny Kaye as

The vessel with the pestle is the brew that is true
But the flagon with the dragon is the mug with the drug

Or something like that.

Inexplicably, King Claudius allows the wife that he loves to drink the poison.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: He's fat and scan of breath. Here, Hamlet, take my napkin. Rub thy brows. The Queen carouses to thy fortune.
HAMLET: Good madam.
KING CLAUDIUS: Gertrude, do not drink.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I will, my lord, I pray you pardon me
KING CLAUDIUS (aside): It is the poisoned cup; it is too late.

Now this sequence is obviously unlikely, so I propose a rewrite:

KING CLAUDIUS: Gertrude, do not drink.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I will, my lord, I pray you...
KING CLAUDIUS: For fuck's sake, don't drink it. It's fucking poisoned.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Oh, all right then.

Homer - The Odyssey

After having wandered around the Mediterranean for ten years and inspiring every road movie ever made, Odysseus finds his palace overrun by suitors. They are then contemptuously dispatched by Odysseus and his son, Telemachus. You might have thought that was enough, and Homer could top it all off with a Tom Cruise style father-and-son bonding moment.

But no, the suitors had girlfriends who worked in the palace. Given Odysseus had been gone twenty years, most of these women would have been too young to even remember their old king, and so could be forgiven for consorting with his enemies. Perhaps a little lenience is in order?

Hell, no, let's massacre them. First, they are made to clear away their lovers' corpses - "groaning bitterly, weeping plentously". Then Telemachus suspends
a rope high enough so that no woman's feet could touch the ground. "So with their heads in a single line the women's necks were all caught and noosed, to make them die the most piteous death. For a little while their feet kept writhing, but not for long." Bloody charming, as my Dad used to say.

So it's "never let it be said that sluts like these had a clean death from me", is it, Homer? Shit-head.

TS Eliot - The Waste Land

Now regular readers will know that I adore this poem, but there's not much doubt that Stearnsy has run out of ideas by the time he gets to the end of the fifth section, when he starts breaking out into multiple languages, doubtlessly inspired by his pal Ezra Pound, the asking-for-a-smack proto-Fascist given to littering his poems with classical quotations rather as my dog Shep used to pepper Hethersett Recreation Ground.

By the final lines, Eliot is sounding like a gone-to-seed, Merlot-addled Cultural Studies lecturer recalling her days in Kathmandu with the Maharishi.

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

If we're honest, this is just gibberish.

Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War

It may be a little cruel to blame Thucydides for the end of this book, as he appears to have keeled over while writing it.

Thucydides, an Athenian general, was blamed for letting Amphipolis fall to the Spartans, and spent the rest of his days in a villa in Thrace writing the first proper history book, and one which is still one of the greatest. His forensic account of the disastrous Sicilian campaign should be required reading for any democratic politician thinking of embarking on a morally-dubious foreign adventure.

By the time we get to the end of the History, a combination of Spartan arms, Persian gold and suicidal Athenian politics are bringing the war to its climax, but Thucydides is sadly not going to take us there. The final line is

He went first to Ephesus where he made a sacrifice to Artemis...

It seems that Thucydides died with pen in hand .

The good news is that there was a historian to follow Thucydides. The bad news is that it was Xenophon, a jumped-up Boys' Own Adventure writer who should have been slipped an injunction for writing the ridiculously biased and sloppy A History of my Times.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment

I'm not quite sure who to blame for the ending to this traumatic book. The poverty-stricken Raskolnikov wallops an asking-for-it pawnbroker and then spends hundreds of pages regretting it in the most unnerving fashion. It's enough to put you off over-running a parking meter, let alone murdering someone.

And right at the end, having been sent off to Siberian chokey, Raskolnikov gets unexpectedly redeemed by the love of a good woman. Aaaaaaaaarrrgggghh.

I wonder if maybe Dostoyevsky had to put in a happy ending in order to get such a blatantly unhappy book through the censor. If I'd have been the censor, though, I would have given him a slap and told him to come back with something suitably miserable.