In real life, of course, mice plagues are a regular occurrence; but in Wood’s novel the fight against them comes to take on Sisyphean meaning. The apparently unstoppable accretion of mice represents, it seems, the building-up of other, often unseen, occasionally terrifying, troubles. Anderson...
To help with that read it in steps if you like, and I’ve tried to link as many of the difficult and technical words as possible to their definitions, where you can learn their meaning, if need be. The big picture So let’s get on with it. The first part in this series described...