So Much Life Left Over

The narrative of Louis de Bernieres's So Much Life Left Over has the feel of a short story collection. The chapters are are told from the perspective of friends whose lives were upended by World War I - psyches shattered, fiances and brothers killed, dreams derailed. In the aftermath of the war, they've settled across the world, in Ceylon, in India (modern day Pakistan), in Britain, and are busy building new lives in the shadow of the Great War.

de Bernieres follows them through the decades: marriage and children; careers and displacements; unbearable or stoically-borne heartbreaks. Soon, another war is upon this and these friends who were raised in the midst of an all-but-disappeared way of life (think Downton Abbey) are old enough to have fought once, and young enough to volunteer again - sometimes alongside their children.

So Much Life Left Over is ultimately an ode to what it means to be alive, the many ways large and small in which we all must compromise, the events both large and small that can derail plans in an instant. Quietly, each of these characters must learn to live with what life has inflicted, choices that de Bernieres helps his reader understand apply not only to Daniel and Rosie and Wragge and Archie. Oh, there's humor along the way, generally courtesy of Rosie's dotty mother, and I wouldn't term it a tearjerker by any stretch of the imagination, but it is, nonetheless, a quietly philosophical work.

Four stars.