This, the third of the sword of honour trilogy, is the best of the lot. As Chesterton said of Dickens, Waugh does not imitate reality, he adds to it. His characters are as ever vividly varied and yet somehow living in the same war-torn and chaotic world. In fact, I think it would be accurate to say that the tension between the insanity of the world as a whole, or of the circumstances and the struggle to keep sanity of the individuals tossed and turned in this tempest is the most enduring note to come from this hilarious symphony. The inadequate effort everyone makes to keep 'in the picture', all the 'flops', misreadings, miscommunications and misunderstandings are the source of both the tragic force of the public events confusing all the individual characters, and also, being full of incongruity, the source of the brilliant comedy. In the end, to echo Michael Mason's wonderfully idiosyncratic work of the 1970's, there is a center of hilarity to this work that envelops all the private tragedy. Indeed, if the reader feels almost like the characters are too real to fit into their fictional surroundings, feels like they are all individual virtuoso creations stumbling across each other and at times crashing into each other, this is actually, in my opinion, the product of the fundamentally religious perspective that encloses this whole fictional world. The religious, Catholic, aspect of the novel(s) is strung throughout the trilogy and in this novel Mr Crouchback's advice to his son that only the qualitative matters, turns out to be a clue to the meaning of the whole novel. The proliferation of voices in this and all the novels speaks to the ultimate significance of the individual and singular struggle and quest of each soul. Just as Guy looks and asks for the way he can become a good man, no longer a so-called 'honourable man', and finds it in a few singular acts of compassion, so it is the cornucopia of individual and distinct voices that each on its own create the human truth that emerges from this (and indeed these) novel(s). The unconditional surrender, I feel, is the ultimate acceptance that the whole war is a farce, and that seeking for honour in it is and has been a delusion. Guy, by the end, is liberated from his earlier state of confusion, his sense of purposelessness, and has finally accepted his life and its contents and no longer struggles against them. Through the dissolution of the concern with self that started the trilogy, his zeal for honour and his sense of purpose, he finally emerges liberated of the delusion of the self. We have the feeling at the end that he has finally surrendered unconditionally to the world, the other, as well as the ultimate and most fundamental other, God. The hero of the trilogy achieves peace. And we, the readers, are grateful for it. This trilogy ranks as one of the most moving and masterful works of the twentieth century. Read it and you will never, never regret it.
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