The final volume in Haggard's Zulu Trilogy balances between the realistic and the spiritual, albeit ultimately siding with the latter towards book's end. While it contains the final history of the undoing of the Zulu Empire and King Cetewayo, it allows its vivid battle scenes, which dominated the earlier two novels in the trilogy, to give way to meditative reflections on the futility of seeking power and revenge. There often seems to be an air of melancholy in Haggard's Quatermain books, but it is especially true in Finished. Time seems to be slipping away, an epoch vanishing, for the Zulus and the characters who have filled the pages of the series, Quatermain, the wizard Zikali, Mameena, and the ghosts of Zulu kings of the past. Allan is drawing near to his time, his own exhaustion, and to the final adventures that Haggard described in Allan Quatermain, some thirty years earlier. So, too, was Haggard himself. ( )