Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maughan

I enjoyed the film of The Painted Veil, though mostly for the amusment of watching Edward Norton and Naomi Watts pretend to be terribly proper English people. The plot clunked along from one fairly predictable point to another. It was pretty to look at (Particularly Ms Watts), unchallenging but at the same time just slightly better than the usual period costuumer-in-an-exotic-location fluff. Perhaps the book would have felt been less by-the-numbers, and as they say, never judge a book by its film adaptation. Look what the bastards did with Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster. And that was only a short story.

So, in the spirit of Finding Out More, I read Of Human Bondage. As the luckless curate said, part sof it were excellent.

The first two chapters are perhaps the most pathetic (in the true meaning of the word) I've ever read. Perhaps they are a touch sentimental by modern standards, but the writing is controlled but at the same time empathetic.

Alas, the rest of the book slides quickly down into a morass of awfulness and never manages to drag itself out.

Those first two chapters deal with the orphaning of the main character, Philip. After the death of his mother, he is sent to live with his deeply priggish uncle, a minister, then attends boarding school where he is bullied and mocked because of his club foot. He tries various professions and decides to become an artist in Paris for a while. After he fails tin that endeavour, he returns to England, completes his medical training, but falling in love with a trollopy tease of a waitress and is drawn into an arid, loveless, potracted relatinoship with her.

The whole thing is very banally pretentious. Various theories or philosophies for life are put forward, giving the affair a rather studied (and shallow) European air. But Sentimental Education this is not - though I suspect Flaubert's novel was very much on Maughan's mind when he wrote Of Human Bondage. There's nothing here that is interesting or remarkable. The philosophy is bland and superficial. The psychology of the characters dull and the action sluggish.

What dirt and nastiness Maughan permits is decorous and prim - ironically, this studied unpleasantness precisely the sort of thing Philip rails agains. Maughan is obviously trying to show his readers something of the grisly little world they try to ignore, but chickens out - surcumbs to his own conventional respectability - rather than present them with the real, unalloyed unpleasantness of life. Obviously, one can rebel against bourgeois conventions and morality, but only so far. I can't recall anything very interesting about how it was written - after a hundred pages or so I switched off, though I kept turning them in the hope of finding something to reward my perseverance. It is fustrating, though, to think that while Maughan was moving his stuffy litle marionettes in their quiant little comedy, Joyce had already written Potrait of the Artist and was at work on Ulyssess.

Now, it is not fair to compare a book to Ulyssess and say, "It isn't Ulyssess, so it is no good." If all books were as experimental, dense and byzantine as Ulyssess, book sales would be even lower than they are and illiteracy would be a necessity for keeping a blanced mind. But one can, fairly, compare a book to its contemporaries. When we do that, it's pretty obvious that Of Human Bondage was written twenty years too late - it is too old fashioned, uninteresting and blandly written compared to other books published in 1915 which are nowhere near as radical or unreadable as Ulyssess (1). I would take The Valley of Fear - or even Tarzan - over Of Human Bondage. And that's just the popular fiction. Never mind that D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Kafka and Ford Maddox Ford all had considerable books published that year.

NO STAR

1 - '1915 in Literature,' wikipedia article, viewed 10th of December, 2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_in_literature)