La Morte d'Arthur

Giant Rats ends tomorrow: will Arthur live or die? I think he'll die. He's lost the plot. He's barking mad. He should be put out of his misery. This is him, telling his assistant how he killed the health inspector--

"Where are you? Are you really driving?"

"Yes. And I shouldn't be on the phone. That's how I killed Schenck, don't you know?"

"Mr. Goldman?" Sherry's voice shot up an octave.

"I phoned him to death!" Arthur bit the inside of his cheek to stifle a giggle. "It was me, on Highway 23, with a cellular phone."

--and this is him, again, weighing the pros and cons of driving around with a piece of roadkill--

For a while, the fishy scent underlay it all, but by the time he was swept into citybound traffic, it had faded and gone. Arthur sniffed after it, to no avail. He thought he could smell lunchmeat again, like he had with the dead rat, and was struck by a horrible thought: what if this was the presence of people--the pong of flesh dying on the bone? Dead epithelials, dislodged from the folds of kneepits? Corrupting cells, kept in sweaty groinal hollows? Curdled lachrymal fluid?

There was a dead rabbit on the side of the road. Arthur fought the impulse to take it with him (that way, if people did smell of death, he'd be too busy blaming it on the rabbit to know).

"I've driven past, anyway," he told the road. "I can't make a U-turn here. I'd have to loop all the way round: six miles to the next exit; thirty back to the last, as the crow flies, and I wouldn't know which roads to take. No use. No use, at all."

He wasn't meant to be quite that barmy. I'd envisaged him more along the lines of Howard Glassman: a middle-aged office drone, friendly, well-liked. Only, he couldn't have Howard's good-humoured calm, or the giant rats wouldn't bother him enough. If giant rats had invaded Howard's office, he'd have been secretly thrilled. Howard was hoping something exciting would happen to him. That was why he ate the books. For Arthur, any excitement was too much. That was why he had a boring job, and a boring house, and boring clothes. He'd engineered his life to be boring.

In the last couple of pages, then, Arthur has to do one of three things:

a) Pull some heroic manoeuvre, and return his life to its usual snoreworthy state;
b) Embrace the situation, and become a better man;
c) Die.

He can't do a). He's been too meek and frightened, all along. For all his scrabbling and scraping, he hasn't managed to change a thing. At fifty thousand words, the rats are firmly in charge. This is quite a feat, on their part, seeing as they've never actually materialised.

There is nothing in the text to suggest he's capable of b). He has been squashed ignominiously beneath every obstacle in his path. He doesn't know how to get out of the way.

Poor Arthur. Looks like he's about to bite the dust. Funeral bells on page one oh-four (or two oh-eight, if I'd double-spaced like I was supposed to).

Ah, well. Maybe he'll survive the second draft.