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Flanagan is strictly interested in what futility does to the human soul — and how it can be a salve, too.

There’s a kind of dialectic, dual track of braiding of hope and futility that runs all the way through the book.

Adrift and emasculated, Stan is less a patriarch than the defeated captain of a sinking ship, drowning in his futility.

The clash of perspective enlivens the drama by clarifying the thematic questioning holding “Cordially” together — how can human beings process the scale of destruction around them without succumbing to feelings of futility.

“No Other Land’s” sense of grim futility is very much the point — it’s what the strong count on in order to suppress those who oppose them.