The final Strangers and Brothers novel, the eleventh, is Last Things. It does not represent an end, except the gradually slowing down and relaxing of Eliot’s active life – though he is still happy and amused, and very active, right at the very end – but a whole series of new beginnings, as later generations take over, and his and his wife’s sons leave home, both in ways which challenge their parents’ love and understanding. But Last Things does deal with the eponymous eschatologies (illustrated in the four corner roundels in Bosch's wonderful picture) - for example, Lewis loses friends to death, and comes very close himself when his heart stops under anaesthetic, an event which leads to a conversation between Eliot, a robust unbeliever, and Wilfred, a local priest. After they have been discussing death for some time, Eliot steadily saying he remembers nothing of his ‘death’, he asks Wilfred about the other three items in the list of four last things; the priest replies:
Lewis. I expect you'd prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn't you? I'm not sure that would be an improvement, you know. But if you like I'll say that you've made your own heaven and hell in your life. And as for judgement, well, you're capable of delivering that upon yourself. I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.
Often in Strangers and Brothers, the action has been centred on other people than Eliot; like Nick in A Dance To The Music of Time, he is an observer and commentator. But unlike Nick, he is always somewhere in the action, and often at the very centre. But in The Sleep of Reason, he becomes largely an observer, and in Last Things, he is almost completely passive, watching the efforts of the younger generations (in the mid 1960s) to break free of their parents’ legacy and enter political debate on meaningful, sometimes violent terms, and suffering his own medical problems. He and Margaret, his wife, are caught up in the matrimonial and employment difficulties of their children and their friends’ children, they lose their own friends to death – out of reach abroad in two cases – and can do nothing except love and support each other with a wry commentary on events and personalities.
The race has been run, the baton passed, and a wonderful series of under-regarded novels has come to an end. These eleven novels are not the most sophisticated or modern novels you can find in English, but they are real, honest, and unflinching in dealing with some of the major issues that worried man and women over the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and the other issues which – quondam and futurus – will never go away as long as men and women draw breath. Read them if you can, they are well worth the effort, and as a bonus you see into the mind of one of the unsung heroes of Britain in the last century.
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