How should it have ended?

Confession: I love learning languages, but I'm often too embarrassed to try to use them.

Reading:

• Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

I finished reading The Van late last night, and I was left with a profound feeling of sadness. It wasn't just that the book was over, although I always tend to feel a little let down after finishing a book I enjoy. The longer the series, the stronger the feeling. In fact, it takes a particularly satisfying ending to avoid that sensation. The most recent time that has happened was with Harry Potter.

But there was a bit more than that. The Van ended on a sad note. I'll go more into the story itself later, but so much was left open. A friendship was damaged and not yet healed. The motivation one character had to continue was gone. It was an ending filled with destruction, not creation; with loss rather than gain.

Oh, it was well written. That's part of why it hurt so much, because I related to those characters. And for a comic novel to have such a sad ending, well, I just wished the series had gone on, that's all. The previous two had ended on a happy note.

But perhaps that has to do more with the main characters of those novels. In The Commitments and The Snapper, the main characters were Jimmy Jr. and Sharon, young people whose lives were ahead of them. The Van focused on their father, Jimmy Sr., and his was at an end.

Not that he was about to die. But he had been laid off his job, and the book dealt with his depression and purposelessness in the face of forced retirement and poverty. He faced his own inadequacies and did not conquer them. He faced his own humanity and flinched.

By the end, perhaps, he had learned from his mistakes, but to what purpose? Where did he have yet to go?

I don't know, and perhaps Doyle didn't either, else he might have continued the story. We always assume that characters stay the same when their story is done, that they continue on with their same momentum perpetually until the window opens and we see them once more. If they were real people, that wouldn't be true, and there's no reason it has to be true with fiction, either. The thought that sometime down the road, Jimmy Sr. finds a purpose... well, that's the ending I want.

But it wasn't the one I got.