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For comments on the book as a whole.

Andrew's downward spiral was so quick, so complete that it was shocking. I only had a half dozen or so chapters left last night, but I wanted to save them for this morning. I'm glad I did, because I wouldn't have slept otherwise.

I really enjoyed this reread but I found myself more aware of a few things...

One thread I really noticed was for all Cronin's progressiveness he had a priggishness about reproductive health. The rector who wanted family planning was literally chased out, then Ivory was apparently running an abortion nursing home. Yet, Cronin's vision of the mining community ignores that many people at that time had more kids than they could afford, that women were often pregnant even to the detriment of their health. I want to sit Cronin down and watch Call the Midwife with him...

I also wonder why 1930's British authors were so addicted to killing off wives by either hitting them with a bus, having car accidents, death giving birth...It just seems like a lot of novelist in that era fixated on killing wives off...Hilton, Delderfield, Cronin.

I was also rather shocked about the speed of Andrew's downward spiral. I thought the whole ending seemed rushed and a bit overdone, with too much packed in (including the bit about killing wives off).

And speaking of British TV, it made me think of Downton Abbey with Lady Sybil dying of eclampsia and Mathew Crawley dying in a car crash.

I felt like if Cronin was determined to kill a wife then the book should have ended with him hiking and resuming the will to live. The whole hearing bit felt pushed and I was half afraid Mary was being foreshadowed as the next wife. Cronin didn't totally go there....but the whole bit of her smiling up at him at the end....Shudders.

The bit that I didn't care for was the notion Chris died as a part to punish/redeem Andrew. Chris did nothing but her death felt like a payback.

The hearing felt like too much to me as well. Perhaps Cronin was making a political point about the power of the medical organizations at the time but still....

Despite the flawed ending I really liked the book and I appreciated its historical significance as a sort of popular argument in favor of Britain's National Health Service.

I felt that if Andrew was going to be "redeemed" permanently, Chris had to die. Andrew was so hard-headed, stubborn and selfish that nothing else would have had the lasting impact that her death did. And I think he realized it, too. With Chris' death, he had to face up to who he really was (again!) and how easily he could have slid right back into his arrogant ways. The "God is not mocked" that kept roaring around his head makes me think so, anyway.

The hearing was a weird anti-climax; it almost felt as though it should have come first. But, then, maybe, the seriousness of it, the realization that every iota of his life could be obliterated as completely as Chris was is what made the book complete. I'm on the fence about it, but I'm thinking...