The Last Call: A Romance (Vol. 3 of 3) — A Closer Reading

A Train Journey Without a Destination

The journey from Rathclare to Dublin is described with unusual attention to the traveler’s efforts to remain unseen. He keeps his face averted from the guard, shakes himself at each station to adjust his disguise, and succeeds in traveling alone despite several stops. The narrator explains that the absence of any personal article—no stick, umbrella, newspaper, rug, book, or bag—creates an aura of “absolute vacuity” that repels others. This detail is not merely atmospheric; it suggests a deliberate stripping away of identity. The catalog subject of mistaken identity might apply, but the text here emphasizes anonymity rather than confusion between persons. The traveler’s motives are withheld, and the scene functions as a self-contained set piece of suspense.

Discord in the Duet

Later, the friends Lavirotte and O'Donnell argue after Lavirotte proposes moving back to St. Prisca's Tower, a site associated with a death and a near-death. Their conversation shifts from a proposed musical duet to a bitter exchange about poverty and despair. Lavirotte dismisses a song from Faust with “Damn 'Faust'!” and instead begins a lyric about fading stars and morning. When O'Donnell refuses to sing, Lavirotte deliberately strikes a note of discord, calling it “the first note of discord” between them since a prior incident. The dialogue reveals their financial straits: O'Donnell has a wife and child and has earned nothing since coming to London; Lavirotte has earned a guinea but sees no future. Lavirotte’s dark humor—joking about cutting throats—underscores the tension between the catalog subject of man-woman relationships (O'Donnell’s family) and the actual focus on male friendship under economic strain.

The Tower as a Recurring Setting

St. Prisca's Tower appears in the excerpts as a site of past trauma and present temptation. Lavirotte wants to return there because rent is cheap and the isolation suits his singing practice: “you might shout your voice away there, and not a soul would hear you.” O'Donnell shudders at the idea, calling it haunted—not literally, but because a man died there and Lavirotte himself nearly died. The tower thus carries a double weight: it is both a practical refuge for a penniless musician and a place of remembered violence. The catalog subjects do not mention setting, yet the tower’s history and atmosphere drive the characters’ decisions. The excerpts do not reveal what happened there, but the repeated references make it a focal point of unresolved past events.

Readers should note that this volume is the third of three and begins in medias res. The catalog subjects of man-woman relationships and mistaken identity are present only in traces; the excerpts focus instead on male camaraderie, economic anxiety, and the psychological weight of place. The train scene and the tower discussions reward attention to how Dowling uses objects and their absence to signal character states. The full novel may clarify how these elements connect to the romance promised in the title.

Reading the cloaked traveler’s lonely carriage, I remembered a winter I spent on night trains, watching strangers’ faces blur into scenery. That same ache of proximity without connection crept through God and the King — Text and Context, where faith and duty whisper past each other like overlooked compartments. Isolation doesn’t shout; it settles, quietly, between the lines.