When Mark Allen arrives at The Crucible in April 2027, he will know it as if for the very first time, and The Crucible will await him as an old cathedral welcoming a penitent’s return. Knowing both, Allen will be consoled by his wrath. What happened in 2026 won’t happen again!
Boethius, awaiting execution in 524, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. Frank Kermode, awaiting the end of his own long life of reading, wrote The Consolation of Fiction. He argued that we console ourselves about dying by inventing stories with endings.
Mark Allen (photo courtesy BBC)
A few months ago, at The Crucible Theatre, Mark Allen discovered a third consolation: the Consolation of Wrath. It is the only title that fits what happened. Allen wasn’t sad when he missed the black off its spot; he was furious, and in fury lies a piercing comfort.
Who is Mark Allen? He is the UK Snooker champion and a Masters champion, but never a World Champion. So Allen’s wording aptly describes what happened at The Halo World Snooker Championship, held for the 50th consecutive year at The Crucible in Sheffield.
It is one leg of snooker’s Triple Crown, and Allen arrived in the same narrative bind that held Rory McIlroy until last year’s Masters.
He led Wu Yize, 22, China, 16-15 in the semi-final. First to 17, one frame away from his first world final. Then, he experienced two moments that will be archived.
First is frame 14. It lasted 100 minutes and 21 seconds, the longest frame ever played at The Crucible. For 55 minutes, no one potted a ball. Eight reds lay like an obstinate archipelago over the black above the right corner pocket. Allen refused the re-rack. In T.S. Eliot’s phrase, it was a long still point, lasting an hour and a half, with a pendulum suspended above the abyss, refusing to choose between movement and silence.
Second is the Frame 32, the frame that matters. Allen had a black off its spot. Match ball. The simplest certainty in snooker – a ball on its own spot, a clock you can set your watch by. But he missed it. His own words on BBC Radio Ulster’s Sportsound: “It was a shocking miss.”
Wu cleared, 16-16. Wu won the decider 17-16, and then beat Prof. Shaun Murphy 18-17 in the final to become only the second Asian world champion after Zhao Xintong, and the second youngest after Stephen Hendry.
There is your wrath. And there is your consolation.
Eliot: Between the Idea and Reality
To understand wrath as consolation, you need Eliot and Kermode together. Eliot, in The Hollow Men (1925), wrote the most precise phenomenology of a missed black ever written:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
Between the idea of a black off its spot and the reality of a black off its spot, falls the Shadow. Between the motion of the cue and the act of the pot, falls the Shadow. That Shadow is 55 minutes of no potting. That Shadow is a child’s question.
Kermode, who spent sixty years reading Eliot, taught us what to do with that Shadow. In The Sense of an Ending, he argues that we live in the perpetual middle. Because the present has no natural beginning or end, we impose stories on it to make it intelligible. We hear a clock as “ticktock,” but the clock itself only gives us “tick, tick, tick.”
The “tock” is something we invent. We need it because we want time to have a beginning, a turning point, and an ending.
We do the same with our lives and our stories. We decide that here the meaning arrives, here the semi-final ends, here the final begins, here a career reaches its conclusion.
But what happens when the expected “tock” never comes? The story we have built around the moment collapses, the little architecture of certainty folds in on itself, and what rushes is wrath in immediate humaneness.
Kermode: The Honorable Deception
Photo courtesy ABC Snooker
Kermode called criticism “an honorable career in deception.” He meant that we know fiction is false, but we practice it anyway because it keeps us alive. In this sense, Allen’s fortnight was an honorable exercise in deception. Selection is never quite as innocent as it appears.
Any editor knows that choosing is also an act of exclusion. As I observed in my recent piece on the harbor, the apparently straightforward question of what to include quickly becomes more troublesome. A snooker match is a table of contents, and the table, just like a manuscript, remembers every decision even after the player has forgotten the intention behind it.
Kermode’s final wisdom was that the most moving fictions are those that know they are fiction. Allen, in defeat, enacted this perfectly. He did not make excuses, and that is wrath consoling itself–not by denying the miss, but by refusing to grant it final meaning.
Kermode would call that the refusal of closure. Eliot would call it Little Gidding.
Consolation of Wrath
Boethius was consoled by philosophy, which told him that fortune is a wheel and the world is ordered by divine reasons. Eliot was consoled by Anglicanism regarding “the still point.” Kermode, on the other hand, was consoled by fiction – by the idea that even false endings help us endure.
Allen was consoled by wrath. Wrath is consoling because it is alive. Sadness says: the story is over. But wrath says the story should not be over, and therefore it never is. Allen’s fury – at himself, at the handling of frame 14, at the cruelty of a child’s innocent question – is proof that he still believes in tock.
A man who did not believe in endings would not be angry that this one failed. Wrath is the match still burning after the scoreboard has gone dark.
The wrath Allen felt in that playground is the same wrath Eliot felt in Burnt Norton after realizing time could not be redeemed. It is the same wrath Kermode felt when he realized that all classics are only classics because we need them to be.
I’ve learned that a writer lives with a manuscript long enough for it to acquire the familiarity of a place that one has inhabited. Its difficult passages become landmarks; and its silences and hesitations, rooms one knows by instinct. Then another reader enters, and that private geography is altered. What seemed deliberate may appear accidental; and what felt settled becomes open to question. So, it is with the snooker table.
Photo courtesy FlashScore USA
What had seemed an arrangement of intention reveals itself as an arrangement of exclusions. The table becomes a record of what could not be admitted, and, to me, that is the consolation of a wrath that refuses indifference.
In Little Gidding, Eliot gave us the only ending Kermode ever truly trusted: We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.
When Mark Allen arrives next April at The Crucible, he will know the place for the first time. He’ll know that a black spot is not a tock, but a tick that we desperately want to be a tock.
For its part, The Crucible will wait for Allen as an old cathedral waits for the return of a penitent. Knowing that, Allen will be consoled by the beautiful, human, furious wrath that says: I will NOT let this be the ending.
