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Reading: All Change
Apr. 16th, 2017 07:15 pmAll Change is the fifth and final volume in Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles. Published nearly 20 years after the previous book, and shortly before Howard's death in 2014, it picks up the family's story in 1956. The younger generation of the previous books are now young adults and parents; there's a new generation of children and Hugh, Edward, Rachel, Rupert and their partners have become the older generation, trying to come to grips with a very different world from the one they grew up in.
I'm not quite sure why Howard felt the need to revisit the Cazalets after such a long break, and although I actually prefer the more bittersweet ending to the series All Change provides to Casting Off's neat conjunction of happy endings, I'm not sure the book lives up to the earlier ones. It feels less subtle, the characters much less three-dimensional than before. There's a lot of infodumping about the events of previous books, but the "new" story feels rather thin; some characters hardly appear, while others have stories which are compressed into onto a handful of chapters, and a lot of time is devoted to the children born since the end of All Change, who I wasn't particularly interested in. There are also quite a few continuity glitches (a character reflecting that she's sick of breastfeeding in one chapter, only to still be clinging on to feeding the same baby over a year later; a parent inexplicably only addressing an issue discovered in a "January/February" section in the "November/December" of the same year). It isn't dreadful, but it's my least favourite by a long way.
I'm not quite sure why Howard felt the need to revisit the Cazalets after such a long break, and although I actually prefer the more bittersweet ending to the series All Change provides to Casting Off's neat conjunction of happy endings, I'm not sure the book lives up to the earlier ones. It feels less subtle, the characters much less three-dimensional than before. There's a lot of infodumping about the events of previous books, but the "new" story feels rather thin; some characters hardly appear, while others have stories which are compressed into onto a handful of chapters, and a lot of time is devoted to the children born since the end of All Change, who I wasn't particularly interested in. There are also quite a few continuity glitches (a character reflecting that she's sick of breastfeeding in one chapter, only to still be clinging on to feeding the same baby over a year later; a parent inexplicably only addressing an issue discovered in a "January/February" section in the "November/December" of the same year). It isn't dreadful, but it's my least favourite by a long way.
