Earlier we talked a bit about the completion of the morbidly long fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Today, Stephen Moss writes about newly discovered unfinished works by the late Michael Crichton. The publishers wants to get those babies finished up, but Moss argues against that.
Leave his work be: publish it as he left it, and let Crichton fans try to work out his intentions for themselves. The urge to complete – exemplified by the numerous attempts to conclude Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood – is based on a misconception: that only a finished work is of interest. The reverse is true: unfinished works are often the most interesting of all.
Any one here read C.S. Lewis’ unfinished works, The Dark Tower and After Ten Years? As we all know, if Lewis did it, then it’s been done right.
I’ve read both of them (though not recently), and my impression is that they were left unfinished for a reason. I think Lewis himself felt that his powers were failing at the end, and he seems to have come to the conclusion that the books just weren’t going anywhere.
Norton published Patrick O’Brian’s first draft of the 21st Aubrey/Maturin novel and called it “21.” I didn’t bother reading it. I wouldn’t want anyone reading my first draft–or unfinished work–it would be like someone poking around in my unmentionables.
After Ten Years is a fairly late work, but The Dark Tower, if it is really by lewis (and apparently it is) was written during a very creative period circa 1940. It would have been the sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, I gather.
But some unfinished works are very good indeed, Dickens’s Drood among them. I’d mention also Coleridge’s haunting “Christabel.” The greatest apparently unfinished literary work in the English language may well be Spenser’s Faerie Queene.