The final book in the quintet; I wouldn’t have read this straightaway but had to spend four hours in the hospital waiting room yesterday waiting for my cataract operation.
A lot of this book is short passages focussing briefly on one or two family members, which now includes George’s pet rat, who has a brief paragraph to himself. The main narrative drift is however the decline and bankruptcy of the Cazalet timber business which has supported them all throughout.
There is a touching final family Xmas at (is it?) Home Park in Sussex, where all the surviving family + newcomers share a last Xmas holiday. The house will have to be sold and Rachael and the servants re-housed. Rachael, after Sid’s and her parents’ deaths is very lost and they all offer to rehouse her. However on the final page her brother Hugh has a heart attack and she is summoned up to London to help her sister in law out.
So, yet again, she has people depending on her – reminiscent of a much earlier exchange between Sid and Archie – Sid, resenting Rachael’s inability to have a life of her own (with Sid) and Archie’s response – maybe she doesn’t want [or is terrified of] a life of her own.
Rachael reminds me a little of my mother.
Get this from Waterstones
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