A book best to go into understanding it as an analogy for war in advance - it made this book enjoyable, its tropes more tolerable. Garraty will never be free of the walk; it took too much from him; it is a tragedy, not a triumph. I liked it for that. However: too long, lagged in the middle, should have been a 250-pager if that. Somehow managed to be propulsive regardless. Extremely Kingian but nicely different from his somehow weirder stuff.

Updated two days later - I think this ending rules and it's significantly increased my esteem of the book the longer I sit with it. Increased rating by 0.5.