Philip Hensher: Fiction takes you to places that life can't - Philip Hensher - Commentators. People have told us what it's like nearly to die, to come back from the brink.
The external process of death has been gone over in great detail. But no one has definitively returned from the other side, to tell us what it's like to feel the last breath leaving your body. We don't know anything about it. Or rather, we shouldn't know anything about it. When novelists reach the end of their stories. When I was doing my DPhil on Conrad, one of the seminal texts, (now, I suspect, largely unregarded) was Thomas Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline.
I was innocently struck by his thesis that Conrad, after an apprentice period that covered the first couple of years of his writing life, then had a golden period (from 1897–1911) in which he produced a series of masterpieces, after which two indifferent books followed (Chance and Victory) and then a distinct falling off into the later works. This seemed to me, at the time, admirably observed and illustrated, and it did not occur to me for a moment how banal the argument actually was. Maybe I hadn't yet read enough yet? Achievement and Decline? That's what novelists do, and the trajectory of Conrad's career – for Moser was largely if unremarkably right – can serve as a model for the career arc of most novelists.