Necessary Ends

Sam Martin feels himself to be lucky. He lives in rich retirement and in good health despite his old age, busying himself with painting, walking and with the affairs of others he observes from his Norfolk bungalow. Formerly a successful international businessman, he has had to adjust to a smaller and apparently more restricted world - but one with its own dramas operating on a human scale, which is the largest scale of all. From his vantage point of age and seeming detachment, Sam is soon drawn into the local community and becomes involved in a variety of events and relationships: a little girl lost on the beach, whose rescue introduces him to Karen Craig and opens up a difficult contemporary marriage; the redoubtable wife of the local retired admiral, whose life receives a stunning blow when they are robbed; the histronic Jack Brentnall, always the centre of attention in the local pub; and Alice Jeffreys, whose role is yet to be revealed. In Necessary Ends, Stanley Middleton explores the realities of old age in a manner inclusive of many of the human values usually excluded from it in contemporary fiction. It is a work of both opportunity and reconciliation.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.