The Sandman: World's End
The Sandman: The Kindly Ones
The Sandman is dead, alas. He lived wisely and well, but nothing became him more than the manner of his passing. I, along with many others, am going to miss him. His family, too: Destiny, Desire, Despair, Delirium, Destruction and Death. The latter most of all, perhaps. And then there's the always-engaging supporting cast: Lucien, the librarian; Merv the Pumpkinhead (The Sandman saga is much influenced by The Wizard of Oz in the series' pages); Matthew, the Raven; Cain and Abel, and many others woven in and out of the tapestry of the epic. But all good stories must come to an end. In a way that's what makes them good stories in the first place.
I refuse to mourn, however. Endings are as necessary as beginnings, however arbitrary their construction. An ending allows a certain ambiguity, a certain sense of mystery and irresolution. What's Alienora's story, for instance? What will become of Hob Gadling, or Jim, or Barbie? A good ending opens up a space for contemplation: it suggests or implies further stories, stories that will never be told. Should never be told. Stories that will lie dormant in the mind, like dreams that will never quite be dreamed. These, perhaps, are the best kind of stories of all.
This, then, is not the occasion for tears. Rather, it's one for celebration, of the stories that were told and those that were not. For completeness, as the Sandman says himself in The Kindly Ones, is a virtue, is it not? And, when I really think about it now, that was what The Sandman was all about. Stories. Stories as the web and weft, the form and substance of the world; concrete, material, even organic phenomena; the stuff of reality. As such, Morpheus the Sandman, Prince of Stories, might be described as the storytelling principle. Stories speak and write him, are given expression and intelligibility through him. Without them he is nothing, and we are nothing.
Which is pretty heavy shit. All that really mattered about the series was the stories. They were good stories, the best that could possibly be told. They were literate and intelligent and artful. Witty, too. More importantly, perhaps, they constituted, individually and collectively, a world of wonder and dread and beauty and ugliness, and characters that lived and breathed and made you care about them desperately. Which, of course, is what good stories should do.
World's End and The Kindly Ones are the penultimate volumes in the series. Needless to say, they are good stories. The former is probably about some of the stuff I've been rambling on about here: the function and meaning of stories in our lives, and what happens through their telling. The latter marks the climax of the saga, and is probably not quite as good a story as it should be. By which I mean it didn't make me cry, and all the best stories should make me cry. These collections, then, represent an ending, a closure, and in so doing open up the space for a thousand and more stories, some of which will be told in the final volume and others of which will be left to our own imaginations. Which, as I've already made clear, is where they are already and should be. I don't think there's anything more to be said, do you?