[John Whitworth]

Competition: Seeking closure

LUCY VICKERY
SATURDAY, 4TH FEBRUARY 2012

In Competition No. 2732 you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. This challenge is a twist on the magnificent annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which salutes the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ Entrants are invited to come up with deliberately dreadful openings to imaginary novels. It was a most enjoyable competition to judge. I was entertained by some truly vile abuses of the English language, the best-worst of which appear below and earn their authors £25 apiece. Dishonourable mentions to Charles Chadwick, Adam Campbell, R.S. Gwynn, W.J. Webster and Katie Mallett. The bonus fiver goes to Basil Ransome-Davies.

Clive stood among the smoking ruins of the Taj Mahal and regarded the blood-drenched corpses of the Venusian neo-Nazi zombies, the lethal work of his shadow — the shadow that lurked in the recesses of his mind, both regressive and creative Violence had always been forbidden to him, yet when called upon he had dispensed it in the name of justice and humanity, doubtless an example of the enantiodromia that balanced out and purified pathological extremes. With an expression that was both a bitter grimace of repudiation and the serene acceptance of a heightened moral awareness, he flung down the AK47 and strode out, uplifted by a clarified, transcendental vision, into the radiant sunrise, towards the ocean where the dolphins with their secret wisdom would welcome him and heal the hurt that lingered with the stinging pain of a physical wound in the secret depths of his soul.
Basil Ransome-Davies

And so, with the reconciliation of Fredegond and Arabella, things had come full circle. Or perhaps, since this was the second time that they had been thus alienated and subsequently reunited, we may say that they had completed a full second circle, thus executing a graceful figure of eight. Which, of course, is the symbol for infinity, and by extension of the eternity during which we may wish their harmony to continue. And if the reader will indulge our fancy a little longer and allow us to include the lesser disagreements that overtook them in Java and Mexico, we may even extend the metaphor by adding two more circles to symbolise their trajectory in the familiar shape of a four-leaved clover, and bid them farewell, and the good fortune that has traditionally been held to follow the discovery of that rare and propitious plant.
Noel Petty

However, not long after I had received Aunt Hortensia’s legacy, and after the stormy and star-crossed courtship of 17 years, which has been documented in such detail in the pages of this book, which is itself now drawing to its close, Emily suddenly and quite inexplicably refused to marry me after all, although we could now, I imagine, have lived comfortably at least for a number of years in the future. Unsure whether to join the Foreign Legion or enter a monastery (I have, incidentally, as yet not made up my mind), as I stood at the window, my glance fell on the low garden wall, glanced off it and landed in the road, along which, had it been a Tuesday at nine, although in fact it was now Friday at four-thirty in the afternoon, the domestic anthracite delivery lorry of Lytton Coalportage Limited would have been driving.
Brian Murdoch

Coughing meditatively, Inspector Malmsey drew his eyes from the middle distance, placing them squarely on the agog Cogmantlefordshire family assembled, like the fleshy components of some intricately disassembled contraption, about the drawing-room. Over the past 14 weeks he had deliberated and cogitated, often simultaneously, yet the Truth he had to impart remained unpalatable as dead dog: he could not say whether Lord Cogmantlefordshire had been murdered, nor by whom.Words, their meanings as changeable as skirt lengths of the 1960s, could not be trusted to deliver his conclusion, any more than could Royal Mail. Besides, as he had exhaustively proved, the five human senses mediating all evidence in the case were as imperfect and susceptible to corruption as a politician with those traits. Finally, with the portentous slowness of Bernard Shaw’s ‘Metabiological Pentateuch’ Back to Methuselah, Malmsey’s shoulders gave a monumental shrug none who saw it would forget or comprehend.
Adrian Fry

And so: amen. The night’s foot presses woozily on the brake, and the squealing finale commences. We strain to hear the cracked wood splinter, for the body of our heroine to turn from cold nemesis to suppurating abalone. For the nymph with whom we were so sportive at the outset is on her trajectory from clammy flesh to molten ribcage to nada, nada, nada: the disjunctive peal of the bells, going like the clappers in the belfry, sends us to sleep as surely as it awakens us to the melancholy echolalia of the chief mourner, fingers slouching in his surly pockets. If only he, if it were that he, if peradventure he … Poor Crispin. After his slam-dunk in the faery dell, there is nothing to console him but the remembrance of that day with gossamer wings, that recollection of the butterfly by the standing pool. He is a newt.
Bill Greenwell

Leaning over the little body, Esmeralda howled aloud, raining torrents of tempestuous tears onto the still face already turning ashen in death. To everything is a season, turn, turn, turn... Faithful Frank, stone-deaf from birth, saw her wild, streaming eyes and with the acuity of the simple-minded divined instantly the cause of her anguish. His own face crumpled like a pair of old underpants cast aside in a strange bathroom and he, too, began to weep, weep, weep. Huge gusty blarings like a herd of inconsolable elephants shook the wall-hangings and startled the wee mice that scuttled about in the attics above. And so passed the last heir of the house of Pendimmock and the seabirds wheeled and shrieked and old Barwick the milkman, who knew about love and death, put the clinking bottles on the first doorstep on the winding street to mark the new day.
J.C.H Mounsey