This is the last novel in a quintet I wrote about at great length here. I’ve not got a great deal to add, except to say how incredibly more-ish it is. I would happily read five more. It’s like mainlining plot. I must just say how deeply annoying this review is in the Guardian:
And yet there remains something deeply and comfortingly old-fashioned about what we are told will be the last slice of Cazalet life. . . it cleaves to the reassuring form of the family drama, in which people come and go, get born and die off, fall in and out of love, and either stay firmly on track or go spectacularly off the rails. Even in 1990, it was hardly innovative, and now, despite our Downton-friendly, pastiche-loving times, it is difficult to imagine many more novels like this appearing. .
I suspect this person of being a judge on that waste-of-time prize the Booker, which just loves to reward ‘innovation’ in novelistic form – ie, the pretense that books are better without plots. This is all nonsense. I bet if you asked this person what their family was like, they would reply exactly as above – people come and go, fall in and out of life, etc. LIFE IS PLOT. And I bet this person, just like everyone else who ever lived, doesn’t like hearing other people describe their dreams (” . . and then the horse turned into a handbag . . “). And why is that? BECAUSE PLOTLESS STORIES ARE BORING