Jun 15, 2016 02:19 PM
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Barker's final volume of the "Great War Trilogy" does an admirable job of bringing the series to its expected but none-the-less tragic conclusion. Although The Ghost Road deserves the five stars I awarded it and the Booker prize, it does so in large measure because of what has come before. Barker has created a trilogy in which each volume points the way forward toward the inevitable ending, but in which the final volume suffuses the whole with a new level of meaning as the reader reflects on the first two volumes with a deepened understanding after(even while!) reading the third. It is difficult to comprehend how we continue to send young men(and now young women too) into the meat grinders of war after war from which even those who return alive and physically whole do not do so undamaged by the experience. It is futile to imagine that literature has the power to end war, but this series of fine novels makes a powerful argument that war is itself insanity and that our jingoistic politicians and those who elect them are doing violence to our society that will affect generations to come. Works such as this are necessary to remind us that the essence of war is not in flags, parades, and uniforms but in the cries of hideously wounded men crying out for their mothers as the world explodes in mud and blood around them. It is important that we remembe