The End of the Battle

Rating:
Summary: Inspirational and entertaining conclusion to trilogy
Review: As the final and easily the best volume in Waugh's Sword of Honor Trilogy, this book manages to stay light and amusing while dealing with the greatest taboo subject of twentieth century literature: man's relationship with God. Waugh handles the weighty topic with the same dexterity with which he treats all of his subjects, never bogging down and keeping the reader laughing. The story also provides interesting historical material on both WWII and the disappearance of the English aristocracy. I would recommend reading Men at Arms and Officers & Gentlemen, the first two volumes of the trilogy, to be able to follow the story and the significance of the events.

Rating:
Summary: A somber, but satisfying conclusion to Sword of Honor
Review: The acclaimed Sword of Honor trilogy concludes in this somber, but still hopeful story of the closing days of WWII in Europe. The protagonist, no-longer-youthful British officer Guy Crouchback, is assigned as liaison to a group of Yugoslav partisans, and finds himself involved in the plight of a group of desperate Jewish refugees. On the Home Front, Guy re-unites with his ex-wife Virginia (for whom he still has strong feelings) but can she provide him with a hoped-for heir, or will she die like the character in Ludovic's novel, forcing Guy to seek love and happiness elsewhere?

Early in the book, Guy's father admonishes that "if only one soul is saved, that is full compensation" and this seems to be the real point of the author's story, and ultimately of the entire trilogy: after all the nonsense, the foolishness, the failures, and even the horror, just one single act of mercy can be enough to account for a wasted life. This hope for a final justification lends an optimistic tone to a book that is otherwise filled with the death and destruction of the bombing of London, but it also ties together the various themes that the trilogy has focused on: the senselessness of war, the relevance (or irrelevance) of Catholicism, and the manifest follies and inequities of modern Britain and Western culture generally. If the first two volumes of this series seemed a little too light and pointless, this book is where it all really pays off. A strong statement about how one man makes sense of an increasingly senseless world.

Rating:
Summary: A somber, but satisfying conclusion to Sword of Honor
Review: The acclaimed Sword of Honor trilogy concludes in this somber, but still hopeful story of the closing days of WWII in Europe. The protagonist, no-longer-youthful British officer Guy Crouchback, is assigned as liaison to a group of Yugoslav partisans, and finds himself involved in the plight of a group of desperate Jewish refugees. On the Home Front, Guy re-unites with his ex-wife Virginia (for whom he still has strong feelings) but can she provide him with a hoped-for heir, or will she die like the character in Ludovic's novel, forcing Guy to seek love and happiness elsewhere?

Early in the book, Guy's father admonishes that "if only one soul is saved, that is full compensation" and this seems to be the real point of the author's story, and ultimately of the entire trilogy: after all the nonsense, the foolishness, the failures, and even the horror, just one single act of mercy can be enough to account for a wasted life. This hope for a final justification lends an optimistic tone to a book that is otherwise filled with the death and destruction of the bombing of London, but it also ties together the various themes that the trilogy has focused on: the senselessness of war, the relevance (or irrelevance) of Catholicism, and the manifest follies and inequities of modern Britain and Western culture generally. If the first two volumes of this series seemed a little too light and pointless, this book is where it all really pays off. A strong statement about how one man makes sense of an increasingly senseless world.

Rating:
Summary: Victory Without Heroes
Review: The final volume in Evelyn Waugh's "Sword Of Honour" trilogy brings us to the end of World War II, as Guy Crouchback's quest to find glory on the battlefield has sputtered out. When we meet him in this volume, he is more of a shell than ever, his psyche ripped apart by the terrible fighting he witnessed on Crete. Will he find one last shot at redemption, of ending his own private war in victory rather than defeat?

"End Of The Battle" is the most problematic of Waugh's trilogy. The humor found in the preceding volumes is nearly gone. Key characters are snuffed out without warning. Waugh is bluntly straightforward about what he sees as the chief failing of his own country in war, a failing he saw carried over into the time he wrote this in 1960-61: The lapse of British will in the face of leftist challenge and Soviet domination.

There's no way I'd recommend any reader to this book without first getting his or her hands on "Men At Arms" or "Officers And Gentlemen," if not both. "End Of The Battle" assumes a reader is familiar with the concepts Waugh spent those last two books espousing, the cause of Catholic exceptionalism in the face of mundanity and evil, the slow strangulation of martial spirit by bureaucratic "banf," Guy's inability to have children. If you don't care about this stuff going in, Waugh is not going to do much to sell you. He already laid the groundwork in the earlier volumes; "End Of The Battle" is concerned with resolution.

There's many Waugh bete noirs in evidence, some which will no doubt bother many modern readers. Communists and leftists are practically interchangable, and there's a "velvet mafia" at work, too, homosexuals who toil to undercut democracy and serve Uncle Joe Stalin. Even if this was not at odds with history (the Burgess spy ring members were nearly all gay), Waugh presses his point with unsettling belligerence.

What's to be said for a comic novel whose most comic sequence involves a woman's fruitless search for an abortion? Actually, quite a lot. The comedy in "End Of The Battle" may be largely mirthless, but it is sharp and biting, too. The characterizations of Guy, his father, uncle Peregrine, and Guy's former wife Virginia are layered and involving. Waugh moves his story in unexpected directions, and as he does so, brings the themes and concerns of his trilogy into focus and resolution that, while not always satisfying, have integrity.

"End Of The Battle" reminds me a lot of the Hemingway novel "A Farewell To Arms," with the same pathetic tone and the prevailing sense of war's wastefulness even behind the lines. It's a very lived-in book. It also makes for an arresting conclusion to Waugh's last major work of fiction, the "Sword Of Honour" trilogy, as a kind of existential if not nihilistic book that nevertheless manages to be profoundly spiritual in its focus. At one point, Guy's father explains that winning or losing great conflicts matters less than the salvation of a single soul, and it is this Waugh means for the reader to carry away.

Does Waugh do this? A lot depends on your mindset going in, on your ability to go with the often-nasty twists and turns Waugh puts his characters through, and whether you've done your homework reading the previous volumes. Waugh the cynic makes a good case in the end for the presence of grace in this world, but perhaps a better one for how difficult such grace is to achieve.