Open/ Pierre´s Journey After War

"When war is never over" takes a deep, inward look into the soul of a man whose wife and children are indiscriminately killed in the ceaseless aerial bombing of France during the Second World War. His remorse as a survivor spikes a desire for revenge equal to his heartache.
It is between the force fields of these two powerful emotions that author Margareth Stewart frames her story about the lasting psychological effects of war on innocent civilians. She builds a melodrama of believable proportion based on Pierre’s suffering from severe, personal tragedy, and magnifies its significance by contrasting his perpetual mourning with a modern couple’s inability to simply watch over each other in a more dependable world.
Meanwhile, a cosmopolitan couple’s attempt to engage in a healthy vision of an opportune lifestyle during a short vacation offers striking contrast to Pierre’s long endurance of unanswerable images of a family lost in a war consigned to distant history. Burdened by the inability to protect his loved ones, he is driven to social rootlessness. Unable to live in the present or with his terrible past, he punishes himself through self-exile, surrendering to forces beyond control, determined to escape his nightmares by wandering from place to place like a runaway child. A true vagabond, he takes shelter and survives on goodwill shared with others, most of whom suffer comparable, daunting injustices.
The novel illustrates the impact of stress from sweeping, man-made, uncontrollable events that ultimately force us to solve our irrational digressions, whether societal or personal.