This is a good one. Belinda Bauer has a wonderful sense of humor—about death and dying and old men and gambling and a bunch of other stuff. I don’t know how a 58 year old woman can have such accurate insight into the thinking of a 75 year old man. But she does.
Felix Pink is an Exiteer. Bauer’s sense of whimsy shows just in the name—connecting my thinking to Disney’s Mouseketeers although Bauer references the Musketeers. The Exiteers are a group of people who stand by as terminally ill people end their lives. Suicide is legal in England which is where this story takes place. Actually helping someone to kill themselves is murder, but the Exiteers can sit by and tidy up afterward so that the family is not disturbed and insurance is covered. Felix is very patient and can eat his strawberry jam sandwich and drink his tea while waiting for the subject to decide that the time to die has arrived. But of course it is critically important to attend to the death of the right subject!
Felix lives an unassuming life now that both his wife and his son have died. He shares his house with his dog, Mabel. His life is, in fact, very well ordered. When his Exiteer partner, Chris, decides to quit, a young lady takes his place. And in their first venture together, things do not go as planned, and the story spins out from there with Bauer adding element after element until it seems unlikely that she will ever find the way out of the entanglements. But she does succeed.
Bauer chooses her words carefully and crafts a clever tale around them. Felix not only contemplates the end of life for his subjects, but his own mortality. “He had bought his last three-pack of Y-fronts [underwear] a year a go, and the socks he had now would see him out. It was a strange feeling - that he would be outlived by his socks.” “He sometimes wondered whether his dying thought would be of a half-pint of milk going to waste in his fridge.”
But Felix is not a morose character, and when he finds himself in serious trouble, he faces up to it and in the process begins a relationship with his neighbor, Miss Knott. Bauer develops all of the minor characters well, and one of the few flaws I found with the story is that the focus sometimes drifts too far from Felix as other characters take on leading roles.
I am looking forward to reading more of Belinda Bauer’s books.