A long, dense, sometimes difficult book about a long, dense, difficult man. Har har. Christopher Tiejens is a gentleman and a gentleman is beholden to a myriad unspoken and unwritten laws, many of which appear to be made up by the gentleman to justify rather silly behaviour. Or perhaps that's unfair. Christopher aspires to a kind of Protestant sainthood and will cleave to his ideals even as England decays around him, leaving him the last decent Englishmen, susceptible to all manner of beastliness as he bulls through with an almost pathological stubbornness and an apparent addiction to manly noble suffering.

Wife Sylvia ensnared him after she thought she ha been made pregnant by another man. Sylvia turns out to be a monster, for all that she might at first eke a certain sneaking admiration for her convention defying ways. It soon becomes apparent that she isn't defying anything, just making them work to her own demented ends. Thus begins poor old Christopher's travails. Cuckolded, bitched, and now the subject of her bottomless malice, he stoically endures the whips and chains of bad fortune. Then he meets Valentine Wannop and falls in love. Then the war comes along to hasten the destruction of all he holds dear. It's pretty much downhill all the way.

Poor Christopher becomes the whipping boy for all his class, as Christ-like in his fundamental goodness as in his ability to endure the scourge. One prays for a happy ending, if only to relieve one's own suffering, but damned if I know whether any chink of happiness was allowed in at the last. Maybe? Book 4 has some amazing writing in it, but it's a bit elliptical in terms of the plot. It's a bit of a let-down after the splendid war-torn scenes of the previous two books. Perhaps that was the point, a comment on the post-war treatment of the soldiers? No, it just feels... unresolved, After Infinite Jest last year, I probably shouldn't complain about wading through 900 pages and not finding resolution, but the ambiguity of the ending felt mean-spirited rather than aesthetic. Maybe it'll grow on me. I can see why the tv series largely left it out.