I mentioned that my holiday reading had got me thinking about endings. There are two broad trains of thought I had about this. This is the first and it relates to how well the ending satisfies and why.
Endings are important to any story, but most especially to the romance novel which (received wisdom has it) must deliver a HEA. Whilst the ingredients for a perfect HEA may vary from reader, for me, much is to do with the measure of it.
Proportion is important. If, for example, the hero has acted badly, he needs to counteract that behaviour. The size of the apology should fit the offence. This was a notion that Judith Ivory played with rather nicely in The Indiscretion (one of my holiday reads).
Spoilers ahead.
Close to the end of The Indiscretion, the hero, Sam, loses his temper with the heroine, Lydia. She has been publicly behaving badly towards him and he declaims her for it, calling her a snob and a shrew - in which accusations there is some truth. Lydia is humiliated, distraught and angry even whilst she recognises that she pushed him into this to some extent. Sam feels bad. He knows himself to be a difficult, obstinate man at times, one who often gives offence and who is sometimes unlikeable. He doesn't like that part of himself especially. But his apology to Lydia isn't right:
"I make mistakes. Sometimes they're painful ones. I told you, I'm sorry."
She blinked at him. I'm sorry? These two words were supposed to fix her hurt? Perhaps she was being petty, but they didn't. They weren't large enough; they didn't feel commensurate to the offence.
At the very end of the book, however, Sam goes to watch Lydia compete at an archery meet. She wins the meet but an old beau of Lydia's makes sneering remarks about women not being able to shoot as well as men. Sam rises to her defence and with all his usual thrawnness, challenges the man to extravagant wager to make his point - the beau's new crested carriage against £500 if Lydia can shoot a cigarette from Sam's mouth to the target, Annie Oakley-style:
Sam was still, utterly rigid, except for the wince as the feathers of the arrow literally kissed his mouth on their way past, the end of the cigarette exploding into shreds of tobacco. Bits of it flew at his face. He was left with a half inch of frayed cigarette clamped in his teeth for dear life.... He took the wet piece out then, smiling, filliped it up into an arc, showing Liddy what remained. People were already cheering as he ran towards her.
An extravagant apology; no words. Or maybe not an apology, but something better. A public declaration of the right sort this time.
Pacing too, is absolutely crucial. I am actually quite fond of the much-maligned epilogue, particularly in a novel in which there has been a lot of fast-paced action leading up to the natural conclusion. In event-heavy conclusions, the romance can sometimes get back-burnered. A well-written epilogue can settle me in to the sense of HEA nicely. It depends entirely upon the pacing and structure of the rest of the novel of course. If there has been little conflict between the H/H and the declarations have already been firmly made, accepted and settled by the end anyway, an epilogue can feel pointless, flabby, even sickly, like too much cake.
For me, the declaration scene(s) are key to the pacing. Some novels will have a mutual declaration scene. Others will have a one protagonist declare first with the other coming later. It's a bit like a contract. You need both offer and acceptance to make it good. My personal hate is when the declaration happens only at the very end, rushed into the last paragraph or two. Not that late declarations never work, if the groundwork has been well laid, but ideally I like this stretched out a bit.
Black Ice suffered from this rushed-ness a bit for me. The final declarations were crammed into the last page or so and I closed the novel craving more from the final scene, even as I recognised that it was arguably appropriate to the overall pacing and Bastien's character arc. In fairness, there was an earlier sort-of declaration scene (Bastien tells Chloe he loves her but she doesn't believe him) which helped set up the final declaration and made it's brevity more palatable than it might otherwise have been, but even then, I would have liked just five minutes - or two even! - alone with Bastien and Chloe to experience their happiness and relief before they left me. I felt a little robbed not to get that.
My next post will look at final sentences and the feelings they leave us with.
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