"There are far too many serious, sombre and sad things in this life," she says.
Tolkien himself called the story "laden with history, leading back into the dark heathen ages beyond the memory of song, but not beyond the reach of imagination", saying that "the whole thing is sombre, tragic, sinister, curiously real".
Hartley said, "I realised that the group was heading towards suicidal, sombre music the sort of thing that didn't interest me at all".
Zhu knew that, after 10 sombre years under Hu, things were swinging in his direction again.
The story unfolds in a crazy world of kaleidoscopic kidulthood which gets more sombre and monochrome as things proceed: not a single scene or frame goes past without the cymbal clash of wackiness or the splat of surreality.
He began returning to the communities of his childhood to find "what gets called the underclass" for his 2008 debut Better Things, a sombre look at smalltown drug abuse that made a stir at Cannes.
In SoHo, things became more sombre.
The novel ends with George, cruising down the Thames in his motor boat "X2", with the sombre thought: "We are all things that make and pass, striving upon a hidden mission, out to the open sea".
The opening sentence of the novel came to Bellow at the moment of breakthrough: I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
