Kyle’s Reviews > The Wars > Status Update
Kyle
is on page 162 of 216
Taking a much needed break from the mud and carnage in France, Juliet chronicles the recreated France in the English countryside, the d'Orsey estate. A very literary world filled with candle-lighting ghosts, pacifist (such as Virginia Woolf) mingling with soldiers and something like the something nasty in the woodshed still tormenting the gin and cigarette-soaked Lady Juliet. All to say her sister and Robert had sex.
— Mar 25, 2014 10:12AM
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Kyle’s Previous Updates
Kyle
is on page 198 of 216
The final days of Robert Ross' wars have one traumatic event piled on top of another, it is a surprise that more ranking officers were not shot in the face: his harrowing rape in the bathhouse, by fellow Canadians, and the corralling of animals leading to their fiery deaths, also by the allied British. At least there is some sense of who the archivist is in the epilogue, just like the end of Thor 2.
— Mar 25, 2014 10:23PM
Kyle
is on page 139 of 216
The clay trenches seem like a bad idea from the start: already mined by the Germans, in a low position and just ready to collapse on trapped soldiers. Nevertheless Robert and a scant few survive, partly due to clear thinking in crisis, partly due to the elements of frozen clay and snow. Strange encounter with the German sniper, yet at this point in the war anything mad was possible such as the hoses that spewed fire.
— Mar 24, 2014 10:13AM
Kyle
is on page 106 of 216
After all the temporal and locational jumping around of the first section, it is a relief that the narrative takes a more conventional path in the second, with Robert marching throughout the damp lowlands en route to Ypres "the centre of the world" (p. 69). Yet even with a steady lock on when, a sense of where is displaced once he gets to the trenches and flashes back to England while "you" jump ahead to meet Juliet.
— Mar 23, 2014 01:09PM
Kyle
is on page 65 of 216
"Of horses and dogs" would be a more fitting title for Robert Ross' seemingly brief stint in the Great War (singular), as they are the creatures most attended to in the novel so far: the opening image on the train tracks to the letters sent home to the family dog, Bimbo. Humans so far just seem to exist as frozen photographs of long ago, whether they are the coldly indifferent Ross family or the soldiers in training.
— Mar 14, 2014 10:55PM
