Status Updates From Missing of the Somme

This book is exactly what he calls it: ‘the themes of a novel without its substance…’ and it’s easier to appreciate it for what it is in that regard. It doesn’t make it feel any less slippery from time to time, like I’m so close to understanding when it just slides away.

It’s tangential some times, like a rambling diary entry at others, but I actually appreciate the stream of consciousness feel of this book. Like I’m being taken through the research with him. It’s an excellent discussion of historiography, memory, and memorial of the First World War, but I feel the title almost detracts from that - it’s a good title, with good contents, but simply on the wrong book.

It’s very much a discussion of memory and one that finds its relevance in impending modern conflicts. Wars that are going to have been fought, to put it in Dyer’s words.