Quote:
Originally Posted by ccowie
This was a long book and in some ways I wish that it ended after Chapter 10. The rest could have been a sequel. From Chapter 11 on it felt less like a “testament of youth” and more like something else.
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I'm going to have much more to say about the book, too. For now, Ill agree that the book would have been stronger had it ended with the war. It was art up to that point, in prose and and its expression of restrained agony and the rest is much more pedestrian, in both the events and the telling.
And yet, I can see the argument in its favor in toto. It reminds me of the structure of
Wuthering Heights, where the climax of the book occurs in the center and the rest is about re-achieving stasis. Everything after Catherine's death is rather a let-down, but the larger point which also applies here is that events don't have an end, but continue to work themselves out. Had Vera stopped with the Armistice, or with the end of her service, we wouldn't have had the whole story. Everyone dear to her died, but she did not. I even suspect she felt she'd have done both Roland and Edward a disservice if she didn't find a way to carry on, so they could live through her.