The novel’s final part opens with a structural fragmentation that mirrors the family’s diaspora, scattering the narrative across Canada, Ireland, Italy, and India. This geographic dispersal marks the dissolution of the family unit, contrasting the siblings’ divergent fates. Liam’s initial experience of separation is one of spiritual ecstasy; on a silent retreat in Rome, he feels “suffused with excitement, with bliss” (286), convinced of his divine purpose. Enda’s journey begins with its opposite: disorientation, illness, and assault. Her arrival in Québec places her directly into the historical trauma of Irish emigration, as she’s quarantined on Grosse Île, the site of mass graves for famine victims. Robbed and destitute, she becomes a vulnerable figure in a hostile city. The narrative’s rapid shifts between Liam’s serene devotion, Enda’s precarious survival, and the simmering tensions back on the peninsula underscore the siblings’ deep isolation. They are cast “off the edge of the charted world” (267), each forced to navigate an unknown and unforgiving reality alone, their shared world shattered.

Back on the peninsula, the simmering class conflict between the Irish tenants and the Anglo-Irish gentry erupts in an act of brutal violence. When the viscount’s son and his friend assault Rose after torturing a puppy, the scene culminates in the death of the family dog, Bran. The killing of the wolfhound, who has functioned throughout the narrative as a motif and stands as a breed deeply associated with Irish heritage, symbolizes the violent colonial suppression of native life and loyalty. Eugene’s murderous response is thus an elemental act of justice. He appears on the dune “between land and sky” (325), a figure who seems to emerge from the landscape itself to defend his own. This act, while forcing him and Rose into exile, shows a moment where the oppressed violently reclaim their agency, turning the landscape into a stage for a grim, localized rebellion.

The siblings’ eventual life paths reveal contrasting modes of survival and identity. Enda’s experience as an immigrant in Canada shows that her resilience stems from her heritage. Her attempts to fit into domestic service fail because her spirited, independent nature is deemed “disruptive” by her employers. She finds her footing only when she embraces music and the fiddle, turning a cultural inheritance into a means of economic survival. Playing traditional tunes connects her to a community of fellow displaced people, including her grandfather and her lover, Anatole. This reliance on her roots demonstrates Cultural Resilience as Anti-Imperialist Resistance, providing both spiritual comfort and agency in a foreign world. In contrast, Liam’s journey is one of shedding identities. The news of his father’s death shatters his faith, revealing that his vocation was rooted in a priest’s manipulation rather than genuine belief. Stripped of his Jesuit status, he’s publicly ridiculed and finds himself a powerless “nobody,” leading him to seek refuge in the anonymity of his father’s old profession at the Ordnance Survey. Liam’s return to the peninsula to re-engage with the work that defined his father’s life and marked their connection to each other is a tragic failure to root himself in his native origins; his family is gone, and when he visits the family cottage, he’s an unrecognized stranger to his own brother, Eugene, who watches him from the trees. Eugene’s circle is an inversion of Liam’s. In a desperate act of belonging, he jumps from the emigrant ship to swim back to Ireland, choosing the land over a new life. He successfully returns to the cottage and lives in isolation, his existence fading into local folklore. This transformation shows a complete merging with his native landscape, a choice that severs him from his human family but roots him deeply in the land’s mythic consciousness.

The narrative concludes by moving beyond historical realism into the realm of myth, confirming the land’s depiction as a conscious, supernatural entity. In the sacred copse, Liam is overcome with a primal terror at the holy well, sensing a presence that his rational, secular mind can’t explain. He effectively undergoes the same experience Tomás had at the start of the novel, bookending the narrative with transformative or mystical experiences that transcend the official record and fulfill Tomás’s desire to override the British Ordnance Survey’s imperialist objectives. For Eugene, this same space is a site of communion. The talking fish in the well recalls the mystical folklore of Brith’s story. This magical transaction completes Eugene’s transformation, turning him into Brith’s successor as one who remains rooted and incorruptible to the land where he was born. His evolution into a nature spirit is the ultimate expression of the theme Landscape as a Witness to Historical Trauma, showing that the land not only remembers human history but can absorb individuals into its own timeless, mythic existence, preserving what has been culturally erased.