I finished reading The Sword of Honour Trilogy
a few weeks ago and couldn’t write a review because I was having a hard time deciding what I thought about the book. Now, I’ve had time to think and I still am unsure. But then again I seem to have that reaction to Waugh. I didn’t much like Brideshead Revisited the firt time through. I didn’t know what to make of it. It took a couple of years and a re-read but then I really loved it. Maybe this one will be the same way.
Originally published as three novels, Waugh later revised them into this single-volume, seamless whole. (I can’t tell where one book would have ended and another begun, though I can guess generally how it would break down.)
The novel follows an English Catholic as he drifts aimlessly through WWII, never seeing real combat, endlessly shuffled from one odd situation to another. The hero is last of his line and likely to die without an heir because his wife has divorced him and he refuses to remarry. There is a huge cast of characters and a good deal of satire of the army and of Bristish society.
I feel like there’s something I’m just not getting. Wish I knew someone else who’d read it. Talking about a book usually helps at times like these. Oh well.
Melanie,
I have hesitated to say anything, because I don’t want to come across as a ‘pill to fix everything’ type, and because having one, lonely-only child doesn’t make me an expert on babies. But there has been more than one reference in your posts to the possibility that Bella is having a problem with gas. My son suffered with severe gas pain for YEARS. We spent at least 24 months with one of us sleeping on a mat on the floor in his room singing to him for HOURS, because after the pain woke him up for the first time in the night he would be afraid to go back to sleep and would pathetically beg us to ‘sing me’. It was awful. We tried everything related to diet/food sensitivities (during and post-breastfeeding). In the end, I accidently discovered Simethicone drops. Wonderful stuff. Saved our lives (no joke). Available for infants in drops, not metabolized into the bloodstream so sideffects are limited. I remember being absolutely furious with the pediatrician, with whom we had gone round and round with different things (he was actually on Zantac while still breastfeeding), when there was this simple solution. By the time we found simethicone, our son was very anxious about sleeping, and it took us a long time and a lot of work to get him back on track. Wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Anyway, just a thought.