To Serve Them All My Days

R. Delderfield's To Serve Them All My Days opens with a shell-shocked veteran of three years on the Western Front being discharged from the hospital and seeking a teaching position at a boys' school, Bamfylde. The next 600+ pages follow him through the years and decades as he endeavors to teach, lead, and ultimately serve the hundreds of boys who pass through his classroom - and life. It's a kind of idyllic English school set upon the moors where every boy (and teacher) has a nickname, the headmaster is rather jovial and there's a quirky cast of supporting actors. The drumbeat of the past echoes loudly; come what may, this stolid place and its traditions are not going anywhere, or even giving an inch.

In many ways, To Serve Them All My Days can be compared to a river. At times it rushing forth, pushing and pulling the reader through a torrent of rapids, then nearly running dry, all the while flowing from its source (World War I). The strongest feature is the protagonist, David (also referred to as P.J., for reasons that I never understood) and Pow-Wow (for reasons that are at least explained). Early on, I became invested in him and in his story, such that I was able, right up to the end, to overlook a number of weaknesses and irritants.

The first is the sheer number of characters. This makes sense from the standpoint of the numbers of teachers, boys, and parents that David interacts with in the roughly 25 year span of the book. That said, it is impossible to keep them all straight, particularly as they are sometimes referred to by their surname and sometimes by a nickname. Out of necessity characters disappear for long stretches - sometimes hundreds of pages - to the extent that Delderfield is frequently in the position of  interjecting any number of parenthetical asides that seem to serve no purpose other than to remind the reader of the circumstances under which we previously met a character.

Had it been 200 pages shorter, To Serve Them All My Days would have been an excellent, excellent read. As it is, there is too much repetition. Case in point: yes, yes, yes, I remember that David's father and brothers were killed in a mining explosion. If I had to guess, which I do, I'd say Delderfield reiterates that little fact no fewer than 25 times. Is it an important part of who David is? Yes. Would, say, five times have been sufficient for me to know and remember that? Absolutely. The books also bogs down in ancient English history. Again, I get that David is a history teacher. But, I don't need him to stop in the middle of a picnic and give a full lecture on something that happened in this very spot two hundred years earlier to get this. Removing much of this, excuse me, extraneous information would have helped move the story along that much better.

Finally, I was disappointed in the ending. After 600 and some pages, I expected - dammit, I deserved! - to feel a sense of closure. Instead, there is...nothing. Many of the central characters have gradually slipped away in the last 100 pages, but not with any finality, such that I was expecting right up to the last to know what was happening with many of them. What's more, the ending felt at odds with David's entire personality and, in that sense, unlikely and disingenuous.

Through it all, though, a sense of calm - that old English idyll - pervades the book. When David lost himself on the moors, or watched the mists settle about the fields, or contemplated the sun sinking in a profusion of color, I was there. I could picture Bamfyld and the characters nearly leapt from the pages, so vividly were they drawn. Whatever my annoyance at wading through pages of long-dead Kings and ancient battles, there was never any question that I would finish this book.