Spectator competition winners: comically appalling final paragraphs to the worst of all possible novels

In Competition No. 3295, you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels.

From time to time, I set a challenge that owes a debt to the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton – who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in his day, before falling out of favour – and to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Brian Murdoch’s entry opens with a nod to the notorious first sentence (a favourite of Snoopy) of Edward B-L’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. The winners, below, take £25.

And did they emerge, and was it finally, from the Labyrinth of Unanswerable Riddles over the Deserts of Inattention across the Strands of Ambiguity into the Ocean Unknowable? And if so, were they forever changed or eternally unchanged from whatever mutable or fixed entities they had been, or imagined they were, either when first they set forth or at any chosen point along this journey whose nature and duration even they, perhaps they least of all, could neither map nor measure? Could they now say, looking one to another or vice versa, that what they saw reflected that which they themselves were, or had changes wrought upon one, some or all left them a company in name only, a disparate aggregation of people, things and abstract concepts as unlikely to concur on the meaning of their Quest as to be capable of communicating the nature of their transcendental bafflement? Well?

Adrian Fry