You Can’t Do Both, by Kingsley Amis, 1994

‘You Can’t do Both’ was published in 1994, a year before Amis’s death. It is strongly autobiographical, in particular the central scene when the main characters, Robin Davies and his girlfriend, Nancy, decide at the last moment not to go through with a planned illegal abortion. It is constructed in four long chapters, each representing a phase of Robin’s life – schoolchild, undergraduate, young man, and married life. The third phase is key and formative – Robin is still in his early twenties, returning from active service in the Second World War and trying to resume normal life while his parents age and die.

In its review of this novel when it was first published, the Independent claimed “Amis throws off his reputation as a misanthropic old goat.” Distance as always gives perspective, and reading the novel now my immediate reaction was that if this is Amis being unmisanthropic and un-old-goatish, goodness help anyone reading the earlier novels, which must have been monstrous (personally I don’t think they were that much worse – I think the reviewer saw a change of tone where there wasn’t one).  Davies, the Amis-lite central character, perhaps anti-hero of this novel, is, in the words of a Goodreads reviewer, “seriously an insufferable git.” He tolerates other people, at best, and has few real friends. He is constantly on heat, and while his sexual conquests are at first clumsy and unsuccessful, he quickly becomes, as is the way with many author-avatar figures, irresistible to women.

The humour in the novel – it is intended as a comic novel – derives in part from Robin’s Lucky Jim-like frustration with the rest of the world. Where Jim’s frustrations managed to be comic and relatable, Robin’s are simply spiteful – his misanthropy towards his harmless young niece is particularly unpleasant. Occasionally he manages to raise a wry smile – for example in Robin’s description of meeting his father for the first time after a spell in a prisoner of war camp – “There had been the kind of brief, stylised embrace between the two that might have recalled a French general half-way down a long line of winners of minor decorations”.

In essence, this novel is a long and unsuccessful attempt to justify a life ill-spent. Davies is serially unfaithful to his wife, and only begrudgingly marries her because he is unable to go through with the said abortion. The denouement, in which he is caught in-flagrante by his wife with his cousin Dilys -“Within in a couple of minutes he was hard at it…On the whole the thing was a great success” – comes without consequences for Davies, barring a well-earned slap round the face. Amis is confessing to his weaknesses, and at the same time not very subtly bragging about his success with “the ladies” – women are “the little blonde creature” or “them” (as in “never lay a finger on them till they graduate”).

If this novel was a simple portrait of an insufferable old git then it would be a great success. But I strongly suspect it is a self-portrait of someone who knows himself deep down to be insufferable, but really hasn’t come to terms with it, is in denial, and can’t understand why everyone doesn’t love him as much as he loves himself.

Finally, in reading some online reviews of this novel I came across the following analysis. https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/you-cant-do-both-kingsley-amis/

It’s a wonderfully careful, detailed and thorough analysis that almost persuaded me not to write my own review. It’s a little long, but when you take down and apart a Booker prize winning novelist you can justify taking your time over it.

 

All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren, 1946

‘All the King’s Men’ is the story of the rise and fall of Governor Willie Stark in 1930’s America. The novel is narrated by Jack Burden, one of Stark’s assistants and “fixers”, who offers a detached, sardonic commentary on Stark’s progress to become Governor of his State. Stark starts his political life as a honest man, but through a series of compromises he slowly becomes the thing he once stood against:

“Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn’t set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You’ve made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.

Stark appears to be a broadly progressive figure, on the side of the “little man”, introducing reforms designed to tax the rich and ease the burden of the state’s poor farmers. But despite his considerable popularity, the burden of power slowly but inevitably corrupts him, leading eventually to his demise. He never becomes a monster, but he makes a series of compromises and decisions which once taken can’t be reversed.

While Stark is the novel’s focus, the unobtrusive narrator slowly unravels his back story. Burden uses his experience as a historical researcher to dig up material to allow Stark to blackmail a former family friend, Judge Irwin. This sets in train the tragic series of events that leads to Stark’s downfall, and that of several other characters. In a distributing flashback scene, in which Burden explains how he developed his investigative skills, we are told the story of his ancestor’s involvement in the slave trade.

As a narrative character Burden, his name heavily symbolic, is reminiscent of that other observer of the tragic fall of a charismatic figure, Nick Carraway. Even the way he ends the novel

And soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time”

calls back to Fitzgerald’s only slightly more memorable and evocative line

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Warren was America’s first poet laureate, and it shows. His prose style is luxurious and elegiac, powerfully evoking the 1930’s Deep South landscape. His use of imagery is extremely strong –

 “So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the oldfield pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: ‘Flee, all is discovered’. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”

He handles the big themes running through the novel comfortably, and while the prose sometimes teeters on the edge of taking itself too seriously, it always avoids being pretentious. Mainly this is achieved by Burden’s knowing commentary – at times he reminded me of that other great cynical poet of pre-war American life, Philip Marlowe.

“There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage” could have come straight out of the best of Chandler.

I really enjoyed this novel. Warren is an author I had not heard of before, embarrassingly, but I am pleased to have now remedied that omission. It is a powerful, tragic story. The n-word is used extensively, as is sadly common in novels of this time and place, but with that one caveat I can thoroughly recommend it.

Murphy, by Samuel Beckett, 1938

In a recent article about Beckett’s prose, the Guardian called him the “maestro of failure”, and described his work as being “a hypnotic flow of words, the meaning of which is initially utterly obscure…. but persevere and patterns emerge:” Or as one of his character says in this novel “It was like difficult music heard for the first time.” Indeed, the complexity of this novel is such that it is one of those rare works that sometimes requires reference to an annotated version giving a page by page guide.

This understanding – that his work is complex but full of patterns and themes – is arguably the key to reading all Beckett, but applies particularly to his prose, including this relatively early novel. This is not difficulty for the sake of it, obscurantism, but complexity. In this novel Murphy, an Irishman of indeterminate profession, likely none, lives in exile in a condemned apartment in suburban London. He is an eccentric character – when the novel opens we find him naked in the dark, tied to a rocking chair. This appears to be more a form of meditation than sexual perversion! Murphy’s acquaintances are introduced as Beckett assembles his cast. Neary and Wylie, friends, Celia, Murphy’s lover and reluctant prostitute, and Cooper, Neary’s dull-witted assistant. Pressurised by Celia, Murphy finds a job as a nursing attendant at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in North London, a hospital for the insane, where he feels completely at home. The supporting cast attempt to track him down, but he eludes them by dying, apparently by suicide, caused by an opportune gas leak.

This is not really the stuff of a well rounded novel. The characters are mainly two dimensional, deliberately so. Beckett repeatedly breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges that this is a novel – for example when writing about Celia’s profession he says:

“this phrase is chosen with care, lest the filthy censors should lack an occasion to commit their filthy synecdoche.” This is Brechtian before Brecht, which is all the more striking for such an early work. Elsewhere the origins of Beckett the existentialist playwright can be quite clearly traced in this novel. There is a dark, nihilist streak to many of the characters and observations: A child is called the “eldest waste product” and elsewhere people are referred to as “bacteria”. Beckett is the ultimate poet of despair – “So all things limp together for the only possible purpose”, and there is even the refrain referencing the mixed message of hope and damnation from the crucifixion, picked up years later in (I think) ‘Endgame’, ‘Remember also one thief was saved”

But this bleakness is undercut by the absurdist humour that again is a characteristic of all Beckett’s writing (‘Waiting for Godot’ is a very funny play, despite its reputation, and despite the essential bleakness of its message – “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more”) The humour derives mainly from the absurd, often surreal situations the characters endure, which often reminded me more of Flann O’Brien, surely an obvious influence, more than Joyce, Beckett’s acknowledged mentor.

One of the things I noticed about Beckett’s prose in this novel (and hold your breath, this is possibly an original observation) is the tendency to break out into verse, particularly when characters are speaking. Here are a few quotes:

“It was a strange room, the door hanging off its hinges, and yet a telephone. But its last occupant was a harlot, long past her best, which had been scarlet.”

 “The syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation. For every symptom that is eased, another is made worse. The horse leech’s daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum

“She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation.”

“Oh hand in hand, let us return to the dear land of our birth, the bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the – er – fens, the – er – glens, by tonight’s mail train”’

“Simplicity is as slow as a hearse and as long as a last breakfast”.

“It is too painful. Then you shall not find me ungrateful”.

“politeness and candour run together, when one is not fitting neither is the other. Then the occasion calls for silence, that frail partition between the ill-concealed and the ill-revealed, the clumsily false and the unavoidably so.”

Try writing these as verses and you will see what I mean. Take the third example, rewritten as verse:

“She was willing a little bit of sweated labour,

incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers,

that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot

ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost

to fling in his face,

it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints

up to but not exceeding

fifty per cent of his exploitation.”

I hear a kind of poetry in these lines. The half rhymes, repetition, and assonance give the narrative a dramatic quality that was to translate so well onto the stage.

Beckett will always remain one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, but this shouldn’t detract from an appreciation of his prose. This novel is fascinating, complex, dark and at times confusing – but if any author deserves the benefit of the doubt it is Beckett.

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, 1947

At the heart of Lowry’s dark complex masterpiece, ‘Under the Volcano’, is his portrait of the physical, mental and psychological collapse induced by alcoholism. Geoffrey Firmin, former British Consul to a small Mexican town sitting in the shadow of two volcanoes (thus ‘Under the Volcanoes’ surely?) spends the last day of his life disastrously staggering from drink to drink, accompanied by his half brother Hugh and his divorced but still attached wife, Yvonne. They have a drink, go on a bus, have another drink, attend a bull-riding event, have another drink, and so on. Some absurd scenes, for example where Firmin falls flat on his face in the road, or where he is chastised for being sick on his neighbour’s garden, would be funny if they were not at the same time so tragic. Much of the novel is narrated from Firmin’s point of view; as he is drunk all the time, this inevitably means the narrative is confused, rambling, chaotic and often surreal, as he fades in and out of different extremes of consciousness, including complete blackouts, hearing voices, and delusions, with always the need for another drink lurking in the background of his thoughts.

Like many readers, I found this a difficult novel, difficult in some very specific ways. Yes, the language is at times convoluted and obscure; the point of view narration often makes it hard to understand what is happening, particularly when we see the world through the drunken haze that permanently suffuses the central character. Little happens, and the few events that do occur are suffused with an air of unreality. Writing in the Guardian, Chris Power said “An atmosphere of difficulty cloaks the book like the thunderheads that hide the “immense flanks” of Popocatepetl,”

Just to give a flavour of this difficulty, here is a typical sentence, taken almost completely at random:

“It was a powerful silent car, of American build, sinking deeply on its springs, its engine scarcely audible, and the sound of the horse’s hooves rang out plainly, receding now, slanting up the ill-lit Calle Nicaragua, past the Consul’s house, where there would be a light in the window M.Laurelle didn’t want to see – for long after Adam had left the garden the light in Adam’s house had burned on – and the gate was ,mended, past the school on the left, and the spot where he had met Yvonne with Hugh and Geoffrey that day – and he imagined the rider as not pausing even at Laurelle’s own house, where his trunks lay mountainous and still only half packed, but galloping recklessly round the corner into the Calle Tierra del Fuego and on, his eyes wild as those soon to look on death through the town – and this too, he thought suddenly, this maniacal vision of senseless frenzy, but controlled, not quite uncontrolled, somehow almost admirable, this too, obscurely, was the Consul….”

I think I am right in saying that is a whole sentence. I can follow the train of thought, just, and can appreciate what Lowry is doing, presenting Laurelle’s stream of consciousness, but there’s no doubt it makes this a tough read – if it hadn’t been for the obligations of this review there is no way I would have finished this novel.

A few other points. It is hard not to see the novel as a meta-narrative, a heavily stylised autobiographical portrait – Wikipedia tells me that the first version of the novel was developed while Lowry lived in Mexico, “frequently drunk and out of control while his first marriage was breaking up”, which comes as no surprise, and which is an accurate summary of the novel itself. Lowry/Firmin knows his alcoholism is destructive, in fact killing him, but is powerless to resist.

The novel is rich in symbolism, some of it done in a heavy-handed manner –  Lowry may as well at certain points in the novel have written in the margins “Look, I am using this figure, situation or event as a symbol to represent something else, something more abstract, such as the futility of life”. As an example, here Yvonne, the Consul’s recently divorced wife, considers a bull-riding arena:

“Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-despairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated – a feat improperly recognized – boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start”

Later, Yvonne, Firmin, and Hugh encounter an old man, carrying quite literally an unbearable burden:

“Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.”

What can this represent, I wonder?

Yvonne is particularly prone to pointing out the symbols she bumps into as she wanders around with Hugh and Geoffrey, looking for entertainment:

“They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and guttering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went…they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rushing through the forest and saw the tremors of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse—great God, the horse—and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and forever?—the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in midair, …the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea.”

As well as heavy handed symbolism, the foreshadowing here is equally clunky. Despite these structural reservations, I have to admit that Lowry is a confident writer, particularly strong in his use of different voices. His use of imagery is also striking – little red birds in the garden are like “animated rosebuds”, and elsewhere he writes about “the cold bath of confession”, and being “rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead”. Later, the “huge domes of an observatory, haloed in gold”, stand out “in black silhouette like roman helmets”.

The novel is suffused with literary allusions, to Keats, Cervantes, Virgil, Marlowe, Rousseau and De Quincey, amongst many others, and the “look at me I am being clever” manner of this can be wearying.

Finally, I wrote a few weeks back about the tendency of authors to end their novels by killing of their main characters. ‘Under the Volcano’ joins this club, although given the tragic nature of their relationship, and the inevitability of the outcome, to have not killed off the Consul and his ex-wife would have been the more surprising choice.

I can admire Lowry’s artistry in constructing this complex narrative, and I am pleased I finally managed to finish it, but I can’t honestly say I enjoyed it.

Party Going, by Henry Green, 1939

‘Party Going’ is, if we are to believe what we are told by many senior literary figures, a masterpiece, and Henry Green is a genius. Sebastian Faulks, in his introduction to this Vintage Clasics edition, cites Green as a personal inspiration; W.H. Auden called him “the finest living English novelist”; Emma Tennant in the Independent called Green “a writer of undoubted genius”; Tim Parks in the New York review of Books called ‘Party Going’ a “great masterpiece”; A.L. Kennedy thought it “beautifully written” and claimed “we should know Green’s name as we do Chekhov’s, or Spark’s, or Stevenson’s”; I could go on. The problem is, ‘Party Going’ is vapid, dull, peopled by two-dimensional characters, and almost nothing happens.

This presents me with an obvious challenge – are these authors wrong, or am I? To be fair, it’s not just me – ‘Party Going’ is out of print more often than it is in, (the edition I found it in combined the novel with two others, ‘Loving’ and ‘Living’ presumably for commercial reasons – there is little thematic unity between the three novels, despite the similarities in title). Almost all of Green’s advocates, including those above, are at pains to point out that he is mysteriously neglected and “the most deserving of rediscovery by a new generation”. Claiming popular support for my position is a slippery slope – if popularity was a measure of worth, ’50 Shades of Grey’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ would be top of any great novels list – so my starting point is that there’s something I have missed in this novel. The question is, what?

‘Party Going’ is set in the early 1930s, a time of great financial hardship for many. It focusses on a party of rich friends, invited by their ultra-rich acquaintance, Max Adey, to take the boat train for the continent for a holiday at his expense. The title is ambiguous – going to parties is the lifestyle of this group, it is what they mainly do, but it also ironically points out that this particular group or party is going nowhere, both literally and metaphorically. A pre-Clean Air Act fog has descended, and no trains can leave the station. The group gathers at what we can deduce is Victoria Station, and faced with the prospect of a long wait they occupy a suite of rooms in the station’s hotel and wait for the fog to lift. The station fills with a crowd of “ordinary people” trying to get home. As the crowd swells, some of the party-goers find it increasingly menacing, even though it is actually well-behaved and cheerful.

Having set his scene, the rest of the novel consists predominantly of the group’s trivial conversations and occupations as they wait for their train. They are an unprepossessing bunch. Julia, the latest target of the sexually predatory Max, is childishly obsessed with her ‘charms’, her euphemism for childhood toys she has to have with her when travelling. Amabel, a vacuous society beauty, and Max’s current lover, is not invited on the holiday, but overcomes this rejection by simply turning up at the station anyway. The other characters are lightly sketched with little or no attempt to fill in their background.

The tension between the wealthy elite with their trivial concerns, and the cheerfulness of the working classes massed beneath the hotel windows, has suggested to some that this is a political novel, a commentary on the bored upper classes. Certainly the novel can be read that way, but it is a quite reductive, simplistic reading. In other hands the scenario of the group being trapped in the station could have been constructed as a metaphor for their pointlessness, going nowhere despite their wealth. What could have been a tense, claustrophobic and Kafkaesque portrait of the Party that never quite gets going, is instead aimless, irritating, and tedious.

The characters are very lightly drawn. Most are interchangeable (remarkably Faulks in his introduction claims this as a virtue of the novel) and only Max, the unpleasant sexual predator, (not that he would in any way think of himself that way) and the manipulative but dim Amabel standing out from the crowd: Max is a sinister misogynist, using his money to sleep his way round London, with a brutal contempt for his conquests:

“It was these desperate inexperienced bitches, he thought, who never banded together but fought everyone and themselves and were like camels, they could go on for days without one sup of encouragement” (494)

Amabel (in a short story by Saki, about Amabel, the vicar’s daughter, it is said “Her name was the vicar’s one extravagance.“) uses her sexuality to get what she wants, but is really in love with no-one but herself:

 “As she went over herself with her towel it was plain that she loved her own shape and skin. When she dried her breasts she wiped them with as much care as show would puppies after she had given them their bath, smiling all the time…When she came to dry her legs she hissed like grooms do”. (480). (I’ll give Green the benefit of the doubt and accept that this is deliberately comic).

Much has been made of Green’s modernist style of writing in ‘Party Going’. There is a fine line between impressionistic and incoherent, as in this example from towards the end of the novel – the “he referred to is Max:

“he was why she changed so she would forget what she had been six minutes back, he it was who nagged at her feelings when he was not there, and when he came in again worked her up so she had soon to go out though not for long, it was his fault, but then she knew it to be hers for being like she was about him, oh, who would be this kind of a girl, she thought” (520)

This rambling represents the character’s fractured train of thought, a form of stream of consciousness. When I first read this I struggled to follow the train of thought, but that is apparently the point. The novel’s opening line, introducing the theme of death, but also introducing a storyline that like the rest, goes nowhere, is:

“Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.” The missing first word (“the”), and the other stylistic quirks in this sentence worried me – was this fractured language going to be sustained throughout the novel. Fortunately Green bored of writing this way, and mostly adopts a quite naturalistic style.

I originally read about the undiscovered genius of Henry Green several decades ago. Even then he was being promoted as a neglected great- it has taken me till now to finally get round to reading him. I can admire the artistry he uses here in constructing a novel where little happens, and where what does happen is trivial and uninteresting. But I found it dull and hard to complete. His appeal remains a mystery. I might however be tempted to try one of the companion novels in this three part edition once my 100 greatest novels challenge is complete, whenever that might be!

 

 

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, 1961

I was slightly nervous on approaching a re-read of ‘Catch 22’. We are all familiar with the experience of a much loved book, television programme or film being much weaker when revisited (for some reason this is particularly true of television programmes – some iconic series such as The Prisoner, or Monty Python, utterly brilliant at the time, are almost unwatchable a few decades on). Comedy that is side splitting becomes dull and predictable. Novels that once seemed compellingly relevant and important lose any impact. What once worked well in a specific cultural context now seems pointless. Would ‘Catch 22’ suffer in the same way?

Breathing Lessons, by Anne Tyler, 1988

The title of Anne Tyler’s 1989 Pulitzer prize-winning novel refers to the lessons given to pregnant women to help cope with labour pains. As with many other themes in this novel, there is a second, subtler meaning – lessons in breathing are the lessons life teaches us. This is a novel about middle age, about being married through good times and bad, and about disappointment.

Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham, 1915

Customer in hairdressers: “What’s that book you’re reading, love?”

Rita: “Somerset Maugham, ‘Of Human Bondage’“.

Customer in Hairdressers: [knowingly] “Ohh, my husband’s got loads of books like that.”

(Educating Rita (film) 1983)

Somerset Maugham isn’t read very widely nowadays, despite having been a central figure in English writing for a large chunk of the twentieth century, and despite this name-check in Willy Russell’s much-loved play. My evidence for this sweeping statement is limited, of course, but certainly he is much neglected by film and television companies, which is one way nineteenth and twentieth century writers gain a new audience. I think the main reason must be the dated, slightly faded air of his work – if, that is, ‘Of Human Bondage’ is anything to go by.

‘Of Human Bondage’ is yet another bildungsroman. In the foreword Maugham describes it as “not a biography, but an autobiographical novel; fact and fiction are inextricably mingled”. The Maugham figure is a rather shabby anti-hero, the orphan Philip Carey. Philip has a club foot and a sensitive nature.  Losing his parents to the illnesses that carry characters in literature off so very easily, he is sent to live with his aunt and uncle in the thinly disguised “Blackstable”. Philip is then sent to boarding school in nearby “Tercanbury”, (why bother to change the town’s name so pointlessly – was it on the advice of lawyers perhaps? The school is not portrayed particularly sympathetically, but it is not Lowood College either!) . Philip’s uncle and aunt want him to go to Oxford and become a vicar, a calling suited to his precisely located lower middle class status, but he rebels, entering on a series of ill-considered and fruitless adventures. He goes to Germany to learn the language, but this comes to nothing. He then tries to become an accountant but doesn’t enjoy it. He tries to study art in France, but eventually realizes that he will never be good enough. On returning to England he starts to study medicine, but has to drop out when he loses all his money on some reckless speculation.

Philip’s romantic adventures are consistently unfortunate. In France a fellow art student develops an unrequited passion for him, and eventually commits suicide. In London he falls desperately in love with Mildred, a tea shop waitress, but she is an appalling woman who prefers prostitution to being with him. He has a rebound relationship with a writer, but drops her quickly when Mildred reappears. Eventually Philip’s personal life begins to settle from the traumas of his earlier years, as he is befriended by the eccentric family man, Thorpe Athelny, and his financial crises are finally resolved with the death of his uncle, and a modest inheritance. The novel closes on a slightly false “happy ever after” note, as Philip becomes engaged to Thorpe’s eldest daughter, Sally, even though this involves him abandoning his dreams of travelling the world as a ship’s doctor.

The three films of this novel, most memorably the Leslie Howard & Bette Davis version illustrated here, all sensibly edit out most of the story, starting instead with Philip’s time in France, and focusing on the poisonous relationship with Mildred, which forms the heart of the novel.

Maugham took the title of this novel from Spinoza. In the ‘Ethics’ Spinoza argued that man’s inability to control his emotions constituted a form of bondage. It is possible that Maugham may have been thinking of his homosexuality in the same way when he wrote this novel – as an uncontrollable feeling that felt like an imprisonment. Being gay in Edwardian England must have felt at times like being incarcerated. The ending of this novel, when Philip accepts that his long held desire to travel is a hopeless dream, and he has to settle for marriage to a woman he has just told the reader he does not love, may reflect the internal struggles Maugham faced.

Although I have said the novel feels dated, to readers at the time it would obviously not have felt that way. Maugham has a frank approach to pre-marital sex – while it is never explicitly mentioned, and various euphemisms are used, the novel is very clear that Philip has sex with his various girlfriends, that Mildred becomes a prostitute, and that she contracts a venereal disease. This novel marks the transition from the Victorian novel where even suggesting men and women have sex with one another was taboo, to acknowledging its existence, however tangentially, and then to finally bringing it into the open in the 1930’s and beyond. This novel makes an interesting contrast with ‘The Rainbow which was published in the same year.

There is equally a frank approach to religion which in 1915 would have had much more of an impact. Philip becomes an atheist in the course of the novel, and the descriptions of his dawning realisation that there is no god are some of the most lyrical passages in the book:

“Man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but a physical reaction to the environment…There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence” (601)

Finally, a quick word about anti-Antisemitism in this novel. It is almost standard in novels of this period, such as when it appears, along with racist or derogatory comments about black and Asian people; it is easy to pass it by. And it doesn’t play a significant part in this novel. But comments such as “the undertaker was a little fat jew with curly black hair, long and greasy, in black, with a large diamond ring on a podgy finger” (479) play to all the lazy racist stereotypes of the time. They leave a really unpleasant taste. I am not arguing for sanitising works of this kind, because that is a slippery slope, but it is the casual nature of the offence which is so obnoxious.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, 1847

I think a case can be made for ‘Jane Eyre’ as the definitive nineteenth century novel. It has it all:

Romance – the scene in chapter 22 when Rochester teasingly proposes to Jane, and she slowly comes to realise he is serious, is as touching and effective as anything in Austen, and the final reconciliation in Ferndean House between Jane and the blinded Rochester would bring a tear to the eye of the hardest heart (but perhaps not St John Rivers);

Drama – spooky scenes in the middle of the night, the “I object” scene at the wedding, parties, house fires, tragic deaths and maiming, ‘Jane Eyre’ has pretty much got it all – although the only issue I have with the novel the extent to which it occasionally teeters into melodrama….

The supernatural – Jasper Fforde in the brilliant ‘The Eyre Affair’ has great fun with the ‘cosmic telephone’ that Rochester uses to communicate with Jane, but the novel just about gets away with this piece of nonsense without seeming too absurd;

Gothic elements – the spooky house, the mad woman in the attic, possession and long lost relatives appearing at inopportune moments;

Social commentary – education, the slave trade (tangentially), the condition of the poor; the emancipation of women;

Pathetic fallacy – after Rochester’s proposal the storm blows fiercely, the trees “writhed and groaned”, and thunder and lightening provide an ominous backdrop to the engagement;

A heroine to admire, with courage, principles, and determination, and a hero with a square jaw, deep-running passions, and a vulnerable side.

The novel is written in autobiographical form, and follows the eponymous heroine in five distinct phases of her life. An orphan, she is brought up by her abusive aunt, Mrs Reed. At the age of ten she is sent to a horrific boarding school, Lowood Grange, where she is lucky to survive. At eighteen she leaves Lowood to work at Thornfield Hall as a governess for Adele, the ward of the mysterious Mr Rochester. Running away from Thornfield to escape Rochester, who wants to marry her, but unfortunately already has a wife, albeit one who is mad and ineffectually imprisoned in his attic, Jane escapes to another secure refuge, Moor House, where she is taken in by St John Rivers and his sisters. Finally, Jane is reunited with the widowed but maimed Rochester at his back-up house, Ferndean, and “reader, I married him”.

At the heart of the novel is the relationship between the not-yet twenty governess Jane, and the almost twice her age Mr Rochester. They first meet in Chapter 12, when he falls from his horse. Despite struggling to help himself, he eventually has to rely on Jane for support: “I must beg of you to come here.” I came. “Excuse me,” he continued: “necessity compels me to make you useful.” He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on me with some stress, limped to his horse. Having once caught the bridle, he mastered it directly and sprang to his saddle; grimacing grimly as he made the effort, for it wrenched his sprain.” This incident, and in particular Rochester’s temporary disability, and his dependence on Jane, is not important for the plot, but it foreshadows the events later in the novel, first when Jane rescues him from his burning bed, and later when he is seriously injured, and depends on Jane more comprehensively.

Jane enjoys being helpful in this way, although it helps her calmness at their first meeting that Rochester is not particularly good looking:

“I traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle-age; perhaps he might be thirty-five. I felt no fear of him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroic-looking young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning him against his will, and offering my services unasked”.

Their first conversation at Thornfield Hall is a little more relaxed, and although it largely takes the form of a cross-examination, it eventually warms to something closer to flirtation:

‘“Adele showed me some sketches this morning, which she said were yours. I don’t know whether they were entirely of your doing; probably a master aided you?” “No, indeed!” I interjected.

“Ah! that pricks pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for its contents being original; but don’t pass your word unless you are certain: I can recognise patchwork.”

“Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir.”…..

He deliberately scrutinised each sketch and painting. Three he laid aside; the others, when he had examined them, he swept from him. “Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax,” said he, and look at them with Adele;–you” (glancing at me) “resume your seat, and answer my questions. I perceive those pictures were done by one hand: was that hand yours?”

“Yes.”. “And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time, and some thought.”

“I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I had no other occupation.”

“Where did you get your copies?”  “Out of my head.”

“That head I see now on your shoulders?”  “Yes, sir.”

“Has it other furniture of the same kind within?”  “I should think it may have: I should hope–better.”

From this point conversations between Jane and Mr Rochester habitually adopt this teasing tone. Rochester clearly enjoys being stood up to by Jane, in contrast with the simpering women he is apparently used to. He constantly refers to Jane as something otherworldly – elf, fairy, sprite, and asks her for a spell to make him “a handsome man”. This playfulness continues to the end of the novel:

“Am I hideous, Jane?”

“Very, sir: you always were, you know”

Jane’s gradual awareness of her feelings for Rochester, and her delight at coming to understand that her love is reciprocated, is done with a wonderful tenderness and lightness of touch.

This wouldn’t be an honest review if I did not mention the few reservations I have about the novel. At times it can be over-written, and some of the foreshadowing – constant references to fire, furnaces, burning etc for example – is heavy-handed. Mr Rochester’s behaviour, in retrospect, is absurd – he freely tells Jane about Adele’s illegitimacy and his affair with her mother, but hides the existence of his wife even when the evidence becomes overwhelming. The excuse offered for this – that knowledge of a madwoman in the house might deter prospective governesses from applying to look after Adele – doesn’t stand much scrutiny, when the resolution, to send her away to school, is readily at hand. The novel carries this all off with style – the romance at the heart of the novel is really all that matters, and that is done superbly.

‘Jane Eyre’ is much-loved, and understandably so. It is in the select group of novels one closes at the end with a satisfying sigh and is put somewhere safe in confident expectation of taking up again sometime soon.

Comment: 12 Books of Summer

I know I am coming to this a bit late, but having been encouraged by some fellow bloggers to join the 20 Books of summer challenge hosted by 746 books. I was hesitant about joining – 20 novels in three months might not seem too much of a tall order, but I am working my way through the Guardian’s ‘top 100 novels written in English’ list and most of the novels remaining on the list are challenging (‘Ulysses’, for example). But I have decided to give it a go, but revisted the target to dozen from the TBR list, as follows

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – a re-read, but a novel that really rewards a careful read rather than a rushed approach;
2. Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm – I know nothing about this novel, but the whole point of the challenge is to get me reading things I wouldn’t have previously considered, so that’s a good thing;
3. Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham – I have bought my copy of this and sampled the first chapter – looks interesting
4. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner – I remember Faulkner being quite tough when I tried him a few decades ago, so about time I returned
5. Party Going by Henry Green – Green is someone I have read a lot about, but never read. You can’t buy this novel in a standalone edition in the UK, so I think I will try to find it second hand.
6. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren – another one I know nothing about!
7. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry – I have tried to read this several times, and never got further than a few pages. Definitely time to do something about that.
8. On the Road by Jack Kerouac – looking forward to re-reading this one.
9. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller – and this one.
10. A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul – I haven’t read any Naipaul before, so don’t know what to expect here.
11. The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald – I am slightly worried that this might be a romance, to which I have an aversion, but only one way to find out.
12. Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler – it’s really about time I broke my Tyler duck as well.

I’ll keep you posted on progress, of course!