How long is this post?

There are three enormous books that I have struggled through in the last decade. By far and away the most enjoyable was Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. The other two were The Lord of the Rings (Tolkein) and The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky). GEB covers many and varied topics, but there is one in particular that I want to consider here. Hofstadter was a little bit annoyed that when you read a book you are constantly aware of how near you are to the end. This removes the possibility of a sudden surprise ending, or a surprise extension to the story. I guess he must be in a minority because Amazon decided this idea of knowing where you are in a book was important enough that their Kindle constantly gives you your progress as a percentage. However, Hofstadter's idea has lots of appeal to me. There is a similar phenomenon with films or TV shows. TV shows are always a fixed length, and you can easily tell when the story isn't going to reach a natural conclusion in the remaining time, and will likely end in a cliff-hanger. And one way or another, I always seem to find out how long a film is before I settle down to watch it. So again I can tell that we aren't going to have a sudden explosion that kills all the characters, or that the director has decided to drag the ending out for some uncomfortable length of time.

Godel, Escher, Bach and Eternal Golden Braid.
Hofstadter's magnus opus is not a victory of style of substance, although it has an incredible amount of both.

Hofstadter has a possible solution to this. He suggests trying to disguise the actual end of a story. Your first iteration in this direction might be to add a hundred blank pages at the end of a book, so you might fool some people into thinking they have more to read than they really do. But this obviously wouldn't work as people tend to flick through the remaining pages and would spot this. So maybe you add extra pages with works on them, set into paragraphs and chapters like the real story. But this probably wouldn't work very well either. You would have to use the same vocabulary, and the same names as in the real story. Even then, there is a good chance somebody would spot that you had written "The End" somewhere in the middle of the text. He suggests that you can communicate the actual end of the story to an attentive reader by (firstly bringing the story to a conclusion) and then continuing, but changing the behaviour of the characters to something completely unprecedented. You would need something sudden so that it is clear the story had ended and the rest is nonsense, but need to keep writing in the same style so that even if people look at later pages and read words and sentences, they don't realise they aren't part of the story until they have actually read the real story.

Looking at this another way, I enjoyed playing Portal. You start out progressing through numbered test chambers, each one clearly labeled and telling you there are 19 in total. Not only this, but the narrator tells you there will be a party when you successfully complete all the tests. However, if you are really paying attention you should pick up on the hints that the same narrator is actually insane and intends to murder you. And then during the 19th chamber (which is surprisingly short!) you get to realise a true jump of levels (in the style of GEB) as you discover you were in a game within a game. And although you thought you were near the end, there is actually an unspecified amount left as you explore the testing facility.

This trick only works once, and although Portal 2 had twists and turns in the story, I knew before I started that it was approximately 6 times longer than the original.

In other news, I got some "Blue Shropshire" cheese for 75p in an impulse buy this evening. It made a nice supper. I am wondering if Blue Shropshire is the same as Shropshire Blue, or some Morrison's brand trick that has nothing to do with the famous regional cheese. Just like Brie has to be made in France, unless it is Cornish.

The thing that I really like about Portal 2 is the way Hofstadter uses the portal gun to shoot cheese at things. And, after watching TV in the 19th chamber, he read Dostoevsky on his Kindle.