Reviews from the past

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Mr. Darcy was a problem for me, one that never went away. For most of the book Austen presents him as a man whose sense of superiority is such that he has open disdain for those who don’t meet his lofty standards. He’s also a meddler; he uses every resource to separate his friend from a woman who he, Darcy, considers an inappropriate match. Since he displays little feeling for Elizabeth, when his proposal of marriage comes it’s a surprise (her “astonishment was beyond expression”); she rejects him and catalogues her reasons for actively disliking him. Yet they will marry, and this is due to nothing short of a metamorphosis in Darcy. Suddenly he engages in all sorts of kind, generous acts. We’re to take this as an indication of his feelings for Elizabeth, but to me it wasn’t Darcy doing these things; it was Austen stacking the deck in his favor. Does she succeed at making the two credible as lovers? I saw no warmth on either side. Darcy remains wooden, and though the same cannot be said of Elizabeth, her most passionate moment takes place when she first sees his estate; the splendor of the house and grounds is such that she feels “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” When her sister asks her how long she has loved Darcy, she answers, “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Her mother is enraptured by the marriage: “Oh! my sweetest Lizzie! how rich and how great you will be!” Her sentiments are not just those of a small-minded and greedy woman. In the society of the idle rich depicted in this book (no main character does a lick of work) people maneuver to be in the good graces of those who rank higher in wealth and status. The two worst toadies – Elizabeth’s mother and the fatuous Mr. Collins – are one-dimensional objects of Austen’s ridicule and disdain. Yet Elizabeth’s friend marries Mr. Collins for the financial security he can provide. And Elizabeth? After her marriage she plans to protect Darcy from the “mortification” of having to interact with “vulgar” people. She “looked forward with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley.” (2 other books by this author are reviewed)

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

I’m an ardent admirer of Waugh, but this book, his magnus opus, is a mistake. How does it differ from the seven earlier works that I hold in high esteem? For beginners, in the prose. Waugh’s beautiful sentences are self-consciously ornamental; when he reverts to the stringent economy of his old style (as in Charles Ryder’s stay with his craftily malicious father), the novel rises to excellence; in fact, it succeeds in all sections in which Charles is an observer. Detachment was Waugh’s strength. But in Brideshead he taps into his intimate emotions (he uses a first person narrator, which he had never done before). He begins by recreating a paradisaical Oxford and Charles’s friendship with the “madly charming” Sebastian Flyte (who carries around a life-size Teddy Bear named Aloysius). The young men are inseparable and do gay things together. I use “gay” with a double meaning; since Waugh has the two sunbath together in the nude, I wondered why he didn’t take the step of making their relationship a physical one. Charles writes of Sebastian: “He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality that in extreme youth sings aloud for love . . .” In this book there’s much talk of love (Charles thinks that “to know and love another human being is the root of all wisdom”). But – going back to Waugh’s strengths – he excelled at depicting hapless characters being cruelly manipulated, or monsters of selfishness doing the manipulating. Love is precisely what he’s unable to make credible in Brideshead. Sebastian is one of a number of people who are discarded. As the disastrous Book Two begins ten years have passed, and Charles is returning from the jungles of South America. He’s married but loathes his wife and cares not one whit for his two children. When he encounters Sebastian’s sister, the beautiful and tragic Julia, an empyreal love springs up between them. The gauzy, rhapsodic prose in which it’s described is, at times, laughable. He and Julia part over some religious mumbo-jumbo concerning the operation of divine grace. As with the discarded characters, this seemed like a convenient way to avoid dealing with the mundaneness of a long-term commitment. I find it significant that, early in the book, there’s a nine page monologue in which a homosexual character unloads on Sebastian and Julia; he goes beyond cattiness and into the truly vicious. The point is, it’s a brilliant sequence that showcases Waugh at his best. It surprises me that so many people buy into what’s false in this novel: its elegiac romance. (3)

See essay at The Five Star Club

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

This was Orwell’s first book, and the edition I have categorizes it as a novel. Actually, it’s three parts reportage, one part fiction. In Paris the unnamed narrator works as a plonguer (a dishwasher with a variety of other tasks) in a large hotel and later in a Russian restaurant. The kitchens in both places are filthy and vermin-infested. His experiences “destroyed one of my illusions, namely, the idea that Frenchmen know good food when they see it.” The work is physically punishing and often frenetic; verbal abuse is so commonplace that “imbecile” is a mild form of address. The pay for sixteen hour days (with only Sundays off) is barely enough to cover the cost of a tiny room in a hotel (also filthy and vermin-infested). For Orwell the City of Lights shrank to his workplace, the Metro, a bistro (to get drunk in on Saturday nights) and his bed. The Paris section teems with colorful characters carrying on in a state of high drama. When Orwell moves to England things slow to a more sedate pace. But in London he never finds work – he’s a tramp, sleeping in “spikes.” These government-sponsored boarding houses limit an individual to one night’s stay, a rule which causes the poor to constantly be on the move (thus comes the word “tramp”). Meals at the spikes consist of tea and two slices of bread with margarine; men sleep (or try to) crammed into filthy dormitories; the “beds” are often the floor. Though Orwell doesn’t in any way ennoble the down-and-out, he believes that most of the men he encounters could be worthwhile citizens. They would prefer to work, but the inability to keep themselves clean, or to have decent clothes, limits their options. And as they idly wander, their hopes are extinguished and their bodies deteriorate. They’re even denied the comforts of sex; no woman would have anything to do with them, and they don’t have money for the cheapest prostitute. The book is grimy and vulgar, as befits its subject (the Paris section reminded me of the atmosphere of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer). Orwell is successful in relating conditions, but he understands that his insight is limited because he’s not stuck in that life. He closes by writing, “I should like to know what really goes on in the minds of plonguers and tramps and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen but the fringe of poverty.” An issue that cannot be avoided in reviewing this book is the anti-Semitism that runs through it. Is Orwell merely relating the attitude of his friend Boris when the man goes into a long diatribe expressing his virulent hatred for Jews? Why, whenever a Jew appears (and Orwell can spot them), are they depicted in a very negative light? For a man whose compassion and intelligence I respected, I found this to be disturbing. And disappointing. (6)

Five Star Club

Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie

I decided I should read something by an author whose books have sold in the billions. This Hercule Poirot mystery was published four years before Christie’s death (at age eighty-six), but it doesn’t show any signs of fatigue. The no-frills prose achieves its utilitarian purpose of moving things along at a nice pace. There’s not much to Poirot – he’s courtly and a good questioner (which is pretty much all he does). Another character – Mrs. Oliver, an elderly lady who writes detective stories – is more lively. The plot gets a bit muddled in the middle – too many facts, too many leads – but things sort themselves out, and I was able to figure out who did what to whom before Poirot explains it all at the end. As for logic (where most mysteries flounder), we never learn where the bullet wounds were located. Head, heart? This matters, and so is a glaring omission. Also, we’re asked to believe that two sane people would allow a homicidal maniac (someone who kills children!) to carry on for a lifetime. Despite such missteps, this was a pleasant diversion. Pleasant? Though death by violence is the subject, it happens well offstage (a type of mystery deemed a “cozy,” probably linking it to the knitted covering put over teapots). Dame Christie may be summarizing her own career when she has Mrs. Oliver think: “She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.” After I finished this book I tried a Miss Marple (The 4:50 from Paddington); I hoped it would be better than Elephants, but it was worse. So I won’t be one of the billions. (1)