Mason's novel merits comparison w/ Pasternak

Daniel Mason's The Winter Soldier (2018) continues to grow on me; as I near the end I'm not only impressed w/ how he incorporates so much knowledge about so many subjects - European and military history, medical science, world languages, flora and fauna, art and décor, and others - into a credible, swift narrative. Sure, it does get annoying that every single sentence could entail some kind of fact check - flowers blooming in the pavement cracks in Vienna at the close of WWI? Must be asphodels! - and yes there's always the sense that Mason is proving he's the smartest kid in class, but all that pales against what amounts to a really good story line w/ lots of powerful scenes and vivid settings: The protagonist, Lucius, is a Viennese medical student who volunteers for military duty in the war and, through his eyes, we see the horrors of medical trauma care in the early 20th century; he falls in love w/ the head nurse in his remote field hospital; she, Magarete, is a nun - although maybe not? - and just as they commit to each other they're separated by one of those tectonic shifts of wartime and he searches for her, even back home in a war-ruined Vienna after the peace treaty. Among others, we get a great scene in which L thinks he spots M in a crowd in Vienna and follows her in desperation, painfully awkward scenes in which her visits his family in Vienna and has no way to convey to them the horrors he's seen in war, many more. Mason keeps the plot dramatic w/out being melodramatic, and builds and holds our confidence in his assured knowledge of the historical period - while avoiding heavy-handed, irrelevant period detail. It reminds me in some ways of that other great war-medical-hyperdramatic Doctor Zhivago and it would be provocative to compare Winter Soldier w/ another WWI/military/medical/romance, A Farewell to Arms, completely different in tone and style but similar in some ways in mood.