A God in Ruins

“The purpose of Art is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.”

A saying of Teddy’s mother, Sylvie. Sylvie believes that art is an attempt to express something inexpressible. Because art is a representation of a truth, seeing art as truth itself is illogical. However, she also makes it clear to Teddy that while art might be the only way to express certain truths, even art might ultimately fail: It can be the best attempt to express something but may still fall short of exactitude.

“You did not need a God (Sylvie was an unconfessed atheist) to believe in sin.”

Religion plays almost no role in the novel, but the characters all face moral quandaries that require them to act on faith. To sin is to make a mistake that warrants divine disapproval, or even punishment. Several of the characters spend their lives trying to atone for past mistakes, and although they do not believe in God, their desire to repent is genuine, as if they had sinned, rather than erred.

“She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is. Literature had fueled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.”

Viola spent her whole life reading about adventurous children who always overcame impossible odds and inevitably went on to live happy lives. She read so much that she expected her life to be like the lives of the children in the stories. When she experiences difficulty after difficulty, Viola never blames her own choices but convinces herself that it is her father’s fault.

“‘Love is crucial, but it’s an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can’t be manipulated.’”

Nancy finds comfort in the immutable nature of numbers and mathematics. Love can change, vanish, grow, or diminish from year to year, and there are several forms of love. Nancy believes that numbers can be relied on in a way that people cannot, because people are whimsical, fallible, and prone to error.

“‘Sacrifice,’ Sylvie said, ‘is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.’”

The question of whether any war can be good, or justified, runs throughout the novel. Sylvie takes the cynical but plausible viewpoint that war is undignified, cruel slaughter, no matter what the ideals and propaganda behind a war might claim. A man who believes he is sacrificing for the greater good is more likely to enlist than someone who believes he is merely participating in slaughter.

“‘I think I would rather just live my life,’ Teddy said, ‘not make an artifice of it.’”

Teddy gives his reasons for not wanting to write a novel. He believes that any novel he might write would be autobiographical, and besides the war, he does not think anything interesting has ever happened to him. Teddy is not interested in representing his life through art but only in living. This foreshadows Bertie’s later statement that Teddy lived his life perfectly. He tried to be kind, and he never pretended to be something he was not.

“Death was the end. Sometimes it took a whole life to understand that.”

While visiting his father’s tombstone, an elderly Teddy contemplates death and grief. He tells Bertie that his whole life already feels like a history. With his own death in the not-distant future, it has become a reality to Teddy, not a far-off event that he can ignore. Only the perspective of old age has taught him that life must be valued.

“‘Promise me you’ll make the most of your life.’”

Teddy’s thoughts from the previous quote lead him to urge Bertie to live to her fullest potential. It does not matter whether Teddy regrets his decisions, or whether he would change things if he could. With fewer days ahead of him than Bertie, his chances for new changes are minimal. Bertie still has the opportunity to live however she chooses and to avoid regrets.

“Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept.”

After Ursula gives Teddy the silver hare to keep him safe, he notices that her bouquet of flowers is already dying. Throughout the novel, Teddy grows increasingly aware that existence is fleeting, and life can be snuffed out in an instant. His viewpoint is paralleled by Sunny’s later teachings about letting go and not clinging to anything, because everything passes.

“One’s own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.”

After Teddy and Nancy move to York, Teddy is not surprised to find that he remembers the city well from his time in the war. However, he is surprised by how insignificant he now feels in such an old town, with so much historical import behind its history. He has never viewed himself as someone who truly matters to the world, but now he feels that he is of less consequence than ever. Later, when he tells Bertie that his whole life feels like a history already, it is when he has lived enough to feel old, and to have accrued more historical worth.

“‘A boy grows and marries and leaves. He belongs to another woman, but a girl always belongs to her mother.’”

Nancy is happy that she has given birth to a girl and believes that she and Viola will always have a strong bond. She is correct. After Viola sees Teddy kill Nancy, she loses that bond and blames him for it, not knowing that he was only acting on Nancy’s request. Nancy’s statement is also correct in Viola’s case, in that Viola never truly belongs to anyone else. Her ill-advised marriages end in disaster and she abandons her children, but she always remains loyal to her mother.

“Teddy realized that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for the greater good. Birds thrown against a wall, in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break the wall.”

On the final mission of his first tour, Teddy remembers a commander telling him that they were all expendable, as long as they accomplished their mission. This gives Teddy a new perspective on the ideals that the military men are indoctrinated and recruited with. His life is worth sacrificing as long as it contributes to the cause they are fighting for, but wartime recruiting propaganda focuses on heroics and future glory, not on sacrifice.

“Flying on bombing raids had become him. Who he was. The only place he cared about was the inside of a Halifax. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now, he realized, he had been erased by it.”

During his 1943 leave with Nancy, Teddy realizes that he is no longer at home outside of his airplane. His identity is gone: He has begun to see himself as merely an executor of his military duties, and he feels that his sense of identity goes no further than the tasks he is expected to perform. This foreshadows his relative discontent with the rest of his life.

“Sylvie had always maintained that science was about men finding new ways to kill each other, and as the years went by (as if the war wasn’t evidence enough) he grew to think she was perhaps right.”

Teddy sees a great deal of killing during the war. Science—and the progress it provides—continually finds new and more expansive ways of killing people with various weapons. Teddy sympathizes with Sylvie’s viewpoint throughout his life, even after the war has ended. Military innovation is often pursued with the loss of life in mind.

“‘We have terrifically tribal instincts. […] We’re all primitives underneath, that’s why we had to invent God, to be the voice of our conscience, or we would be killing each other left, right, and centre.’”

Ursula does not believe in God, although she shares Sylvie’s belief that humans are inherently warlike. However, she believes that the idea of God is what acts as humanity’s moral compass, preventing them from wanton slaughter. Teddy’s experience in the war, and his knowledge of history, cannot be reconciled with Ursula’s idea of God as the human conscience. People are “killing each other left, right and centre” regardless, and often use God as their justification.

“He resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.”

After Teddy is moved by the music at the concert, he thinks of the massacre at Hamburg and recalls Keith’s death. Even though he feels he no longer has an identity outside of his duty as a bomber, he commits himself to a life of kindness. He hopes that treating others kindly will make him capable of feeling love for them, if he is ever able to feel love again.

“This is what it meant to kill someone. Hand-to-hand combat. Until death do us part.”

When Teddy smothers Nancy with the pillow, he realizes that, for all the people he helped kill with aerial bombing, he has never experienced hand-to-hand combat. He has had the luxury of killing from a distance without struggle. His final struggle with Nancy reminds him of the promise she asked him to make and of their wedding vows. He keeps the promise but mourns his inability to give her a painless death.

“As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.”

Viola tells her therapist that her husband, Wilf, used to hit her. It isn’t true, but Viola prefers a more interesting, false story to a banal, true one. As she has watched Teddy deteriorate, she has gained a new perspective on how unreliable and fragile memory can be. If she has forgotten something, that thing no longer feels real to her or attached to her experience.

“It was possible, she thought, that she had won the race to reach the end of civilization. There was no prize. Obviously.”

Viola looks out of the restaurant window and watches drunken men dressed as condoms. As always, she views her situation with an exaggerated perspective. She is at “the end of civilization,” not merely sitting adjacent to a street filled with happy partygoers. Viola always frames herself as the victim of every situation, absolving herself of responsibility. She sees herself as always acted upon, but never acting, despite her impulsive choices and reckless behaviors.

“Let go? Of what? She had nothing to hold on to to begin with.”

Viola tries to study meditation with Sunny in Ubud. When he tries to coach her to stop thinking, she is confused. When he then asks her to let go of whatever she is clinging to, she reveals how empty she believes her life is. Viola has always run and abandoned responsibilities, and this has robbed her of the foundation and security of family that her siblings and parents experienced.

“Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.”

Teddy’s final reflections are parallel to the lessons Sunny teaches in his meditation class. Sunny taught that life was one endless breath, until the very end. Teddy is comforted, knowing that he is experiencing something that every human being will experience. He is looking forward to having peace.

“And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”

The narrator enters the story as Teddy dies, relating the collapse of the five walls of the Solemn Temple, or the house of fiction. The author is reminding the reader that the account of the characters’ lives is itself a work of fiction and art. They could not exist without the author’s effort and imagination, just as Teddy’s descendants could not have existed if he had died in the war.

“Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.”

The narrator gives an account of the millions upon millions of deaths that have been the result of wars and murder. Each lost life could have had an effect like Teddy’s life. Each person who died in war left the rest of their stories untold, and they would not be able to influence the lives of others in the future. Death causes a loss of life that is not only immediate but that changes the future. War causes vast numbers of deaths that change the future drastically.