Boy, this book really fucked me up! Which isn't exactly unexpected, it's the final novel in a trilogy about WWI, so it's not a surprise that an anti-war novel would affect me like this. But it took me a long time to get through the final hundred pages, because I dreaded what was coming so much.
This third book is about the process of Billy Prior preparing to go back to France at the end of the summer in 1918, intercut with Dr. River's memories of his childhood and family friendship with Charles Dodgson and his experiences studying death rituals in Melanesia. The narrative follows Billy back to France, using diary entries and a letter home as well as prose to tell the story of the final months of the war. He was assigned to the same unit as Wilfred Owen, who I knew just enough about as a historical figure to know that my dread was warranted.
While Billy and the troops are at war, bored for 23 hours a day and then terrified for the other one, Dr. Rivers continues to work with injured men and contemplate his own role in the entire endeavor. Billy leaves his now-fiancée to head back to the front and loves and misses her desperately, while also sating his constant need with men and women when he can. And while I was prepared for more death and destruction caused by war, I was somehow not expecting the first appearance of the influenza pandemic, which was harder to deal with at the moment for obvious reasons. There's a lot to this book, and this trilogy, and it makes me want to both reread the whole series and to read all of the war poetry of this era and just a whole lot of history about this war and what led to it, but first I think I'm going to take a break and read some romance novels or something, because boy.
Grade: A
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