Book Reviews - Fiction (pre-1900)Pick an author or just scroll at leisure.
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Jane Austen
Emma
An entertaining slice of pre-industrial chick-lit. Emma Woodhouse is a likeable but spoilt 20-year-old who likes to set up romantic matches among her acquaintances; the novel follows her on an excursion of self-discovery as she learns that in much of her behaviour she has her own vanity at heart, rather than other people's happiness. But all the messes get cleared up, people get paired off appropriately, and the book ends on a sick-makingly happy note.
Witty and cheering, though perhaps longer than a novel consisting entirely of tea parties, picnics and dances really needs to be.
Pride and Prejudice
Can't remember that much about this - usual Austen stuff, young girls in love. Very good though - well-paced and funny, but not so funny as to obscure its serious intent. Austen's view of human nature is critical but affectionate. Fully deserves its classic status.
Sense and Sensibility
Two sisters, a serious one and a more outgoing one, move with their mum to Devon. Each falls in love with a bloke who causes them worries and sorrow.
Well-written, but I can see why it's not as popular as Pride and Prejudice. Though certainly not devoid of humour, its overall tone is much more serious than the latter's. Furthermore, its pace is rather more lugubrious, and Austen tends towards long and convoluted sentences that seriously test the patience and brain-power of the 21st-Century reader.
Effective and convincing characterisation.
Charles Dickens
Bleak House
Dickens at his best and worst, the split falling exactly between two narrative strands. The one strand is related by the author, the other by his ghastly, strait-laced "heroine" Esther Summerson.
Unfortunately the latter fills up over half the book and is liable to make any sensible reader want to vomit at regular intervals. Rarely can an author's attempt to create a likeable central character have backfired so badly. Nothing about Esther's "goodness" comes over as genuine. All her virtues - sympathy, dutifulness, gratitude, modesty - are overstated to a ludicrous and disgusting degree. Needless to say the prose ascribed to her is as dreary and sentimental as her personality - and that's a lot of prose.
All the novel's fine qualities are crammed into the interspersed sections: vivid description, atmosphere, sincere moral outrage, and above all some brilliantly entertaining exercises in characterisation. In contrast to Esther, many members of the novel's cast have something approaching real depth, including Sir Leicester Dedlock - bigoted and rather stupid, but principled and courageous; the proud and lonely Lady Deadlock, harbouring a painful secret about her past; the charming and shrewd Inspector Bucket; and the cold, inscrutable old lawyer Tulkinghorn.
No less successful, and no less believable, are the novel's grotesque and comic creations: the pathetic, grasping old moneylender Smallweed; the slimy young legal clerk William Guppy; the gluttonous and verbose self-styled preacher Mr. Chadband.
As for the actual story, it's complicated and clever, yet without there seeming to be any real core to it. Esther, an orphan, learns something momentous about her parentage; the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, involving the inheritence of Esther and two of her friends, rumbles through the courts, sucking in lawyers' fees to little effect; Lady Dedlock retreats further and further from the world, burdened by shame; a crime is committed and dramatically solved. There is certainly a build-up of tension as the plot strands converge; yet somehow the final resolution feels strangely rushed, anticlimactic and predictable. In the end, it's individual scenes that steal the show, not the story as a whole.
So, this is a heavily flawed novel, whose flaws are moreover magnified by their being spread out over such a colossal number of pages. And yet, while Great Expectations may be a more cohesive work, there's nothing in it that's either as fun or as gripping as the best parts of Bleak House.
Great Expectations
Enjoyed this more than I expected to. In spite of the sometimes ludicrous plotting and an extremely unsatisfactory ending, it's a truly memorable story full of truly memorable characters.
Pip, an orphan living with his bullying elder sister and her husband Joe in the Kent marshes, becomes the beneficiary of a large financial gift and heads off to London to get an education and a career. Snobbery and ambition start to get the better of him and he comes to disown his humble past, suppressing the shame he feels at his neglect of his honest family and friends. But events catch up with him... I'll say no more.
It's interesting that Dickens is often accused of portraying people as caricatures; but in my opinon characterisation is one of the great strengths of Great Expectations. One must bear in mind that Dickens was a popular writer who consciously painted his world in broad strokes; but nevertheless, the characters of the gentle, put-upon Joe, the shrewd, brilliant and manipulative lawyer Jaggers, and the secretive, kindly legal clerk Wemmick leave a particularly vivid impression in the memory. Dickens never ventures into deep psychological analysis; but these are real people that one instinctively believes in - unlike, say, the scrupulously architected marionettes of Henry James.
Not less vivid are the images the reader carries away of early Victorian London and the empty, fog-haunted Kent marshes. And last but not least, this is a story with an important moral - a moral that is sometimes simplistically and sentimentally portrayed, but a genuinely-believed moral nonetheless: that we should value the loyalty of friends and the kindness of strangers over money and status.
The edition I read (Oxford World's Classics) includes Dickens's original ending that he was persuaded to change by fellow author Bulwer Lytton. It is a far more convincing end to the novel, and one sympathises with George Bernard Shaw's decision to use it in his edition.
One final thing to note is that this is a very readable and well-paced book - a real tonic for anyone who thinks that all 19th-century novelists wrote like Henry James, using twenty words where two would do. Straightforward and yet anything but pedestrian, this book really does have the universality of great literature.
Hard Times
Can't remember very much about this at all. It's about some nasty industrialist who treats his workers badly. The characters are as 2-dimensional as one expects from Dickens. But its message is an important one; and it's very well-written.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
Surly university dropout Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov murders an old hag and her sister in order to prove to himself that he can rise above the normal human moral code. After he's committed the act, however, repeat interrogations by police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, and the constant gnawing of his conscience, start to affect his nerves. Will he turn himself in or not?
Philosophically and psychologically this is a fascinating novel. The characterisation is pretty convincing, especially of Raskolnikov, Porfiry and Svidrigailov (a seedy old lecher with his eyes on Raskolnikov's sister). And the the devoted affection of Raskolnikov's family and friends towards him, despite his many faults, is presented quite movingly.
However, dramatically 'Crime and Punishment' seemed to me a bit of a mess. It centres around tense and vividly described scenes - the lead-up to the murder, Raskolnikov's inquisitions by Porfiry, and the denouement in which Svidrigailov and Raskolnokov finally look their respective fates in the face. However, interspersed with these scenes are rather longwinded descriptions of people standing around in rooms talking about this and that, being a bit philosophical, and generally not contributing much to the plot.
Other flaws are an occasional sentimentally, clearly emulative of Dickens but without the latter's beguiling simplicity; and a lack of narrative logic, evident in some contrived pieces of dialogue, some unlikely coincidences (characters are always bumping into each other as though St. Petersburg were a village), and some rather abrupt shifts of focus, for example Svidrigailov's sudden switch from being a minor to a major character in the last part of the book.
'Crime and Punishment' is an ambiguous work - perhaps a little more so than its author intended, for until the end it's not entirely clear whether Raskolnikov's insistence that he feels no remorse for his act is meant to be sincere or self-deluding. Reading a little about Dostoyevsky's own life (he had become deeply religious by the time he wrote the book), one must infer the latter, but the novel itself doesn't, in my view, make his position seem entirely consistent.
All that said, the novel surely deserves its status as a classic, not least because of the influence it had on later writers (Gide, Camus and Sartre were all fascinated by Raskolnikov and his proto-'acte gratuit'). And Dostoyevsky's insight into the ways that evil and goodness, callousness and compassion, and hatred and love of life, can co-exist in a single human soul, makes this a novel that certainly gets the reader thinking.
George Eliot
Middlemarch
The longwinded realist novel at its best. Can't remember much about it now though. Eliot follows the fortunes of a handful of inhabitants of Middlemarch, a small town in the Midlands, as they fall in love, marry, try to get on in their careers, die, etc.
It's all pretty low-key stuff. But Eliot's narrative skill and psychological penetration make every detail of these ordinary people's lives fascinating. With a couple of minor exceptions, each character is a fully realised entity; and Eliot's wry but sympathetic analyses of their foibles are masterpieces of lucidity.
Middlemarch is perhaps the only 800-page novel I've read without succumbing to boredom at certain points. A corker.
George Gissing
New Grub Street
A depiction of the struggles and successes of a disparate group of writers in late-Victorian London. The central thread of the story traces the descent of Edwin Reardon, a young novelist, into creative torpor, poverty, depression and marital breakdown. Contrasted with Reardon's career is that of his friend Jasper Milvain, an opportunistic young journalist of shallow brilliance. In the background numerous other writers, editors and agents find their hopes realised or dashed according not to their moral qualities but to their adaptability to the cut-throat literary scene that began to emerge in late 19th Century England.
This is a novel ostensibly in the realist tradition, but its ultimate aim is deeply rooted in Gissing's pessimistic temperament: to portray a (perhaps unrealistically) clear division of human beings into categories of winners and losers. Morally, Gissing's sympathy is firmly with the losers, even while he acknowledges that their downfall is as much due to their own weakness as to misfortunes of circumstance. (And in this definition of weakness is included loyalty, whether to people or to ideals.)
The result is a profoundly depressing book whose relentless morbidity, like Thomas Hardy's, occasionally backfires and moves the reader to incredulous laughter rather than tears. This is not to deny, though, the liberal measure of genuine (if grim) humour in the novel; or the evident sincerity of Gissing's compassion for life's failures and outcasts.
Lastly, and most importantly, this is a stupendously well written book: psychologically incisive, vividly realised and - contrary to what one might expect, given the sedentary lives of its protagonists - very quickly paced.
Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
In a drunken fit, Michael Henchard sells his wife at a village fete. Overcome with remorse the next day, he swears off the juice and, against the odds, makes a success of himself, becoming mayor of the town of Casterbridge.
However, in various guises Henchard's past comes back to haunt him, while the arrival in town of Farfrae, a shrewd young Scottish entrepreneur, reawakens his old feelings of inadequacy, with tragic results.
No one reads Hardy to be cheered up, and this novel is as depressing as one would expect. However, the physical description is as beautiful and vivid as ever, while the unstable, ambiguous character of Henchard is very subtly drawn.
The ending is as moving as it is cheesy - a trick only Hardy, perhaps, could have pulled off.
Not as good asTess, though - I found it a bit slow-moving in places.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield lives with her poor parents. One day, through carelessness, she injures and kills the family's only horse - an occurrence which triggers a tragic chain of events as Tess tries to make up for her negligence. Presiding over her fate is Alec D'Urberville, a nouveau-riche cad who rapes her and then exploits the power over her that his money gives.
Tess travels about trying to make ends meet, and falls in love with Angel Clare, a well-meaning but unreliable young dreamer. Just when things look as though they're picking up... well, I won't spoil the story for you. Just bear in mind this is a Thomas Hardy novel, so don't expect anything particularly life-affirming.
This is one of my all-time favourite novels, despite its flaws. A couple of the characters - in particular, Tess's lover Angel Clare - are made to behave in unconvincing ways in the interests of plot furtherance; and the climactic scene at Stonehenge is decidedly stagey. That said, for me the staginess works: it's always applied in the service of portraying profound emotional truths, and any artist worth his salt knows that portraying truths doesn't simply mean portraying a reality that is objectively credible.
What really works for me is the way that, from the moment Tess's horse dies, we sense Tess tumbling, bit by bit, towards an inevitable fate. This fate is made all the more poignant by the "intermission" in the middle of the book when we get the tantalising glimpse of hope that things might yet turn out for the best.
Like Shakespeare's tragedies, Tess can't be appreciated by applying standards of objective credibility. It's superbly paced, and I haven't even mentioned the Hardyesque physical descriptions that really make you see the Dorset countryside instantly, virtually without even trying - a truly rare gift in a writer.
But a final warning: don't read this novel if you're feeling really depressed. It won't help.
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
Isabel Archer is a young American who is taken under the wing of some rich relatives who live in England. She doesn't know what to do with her life, but she has a general faith that things will turn out for the best and that many exciting things lie in store for her. Because she doesn't feel ready to settle down, she spurns, ever so nicely, the advances of two respectable and well-heeled suitors, and heads off to Europe.
She ends up marrying an idle American aesthete who has settled in Florence, Gilbert Osmond. Osmond proves to be a git, and life doesn't turn out the way she'd hoped or planned.
If this novel has a message, I suppose it's that no one can hang on to the exuberance and optimism of youth forever. The implication, I think, is that if Isabel had committed herself to a specific course of action sooner, she'd have ended up much happier.
Although this novel is regarded as one of James' masterpieces, I found it to be deeply flawed. James' prose - discursive, often verbose, occasionally pretentious - is not for all palates, but you get used to it; and it does yield some marvellously apposite metaphors and descriptive passages.
No, more irritating for me are the qualities of James' dialogue and characterisation (two sides of the same coin, perhaps). Almost all his characters display psychological inconsistencies that just don't make sense except in terms of the need to keep the plot moving; characters who are supposed to be obtuse or naive tell us how obtuse or naive they are, rather than showing it through their behaviour; and most significantly, it remains a mystery to me why Isabel - an intelligent, perceptive woman - should have fallen in love with Osmond, having declined the offers of men manifestly better than him. Meanwhile, Osmond himself is a perfect caricature of a Nasty Man. And other characters, for example Isabel's friend Madame Merle, remain to the end of the novel complete ciphers, strategically placed narrative props without much convincing psychological reality to them.
There are certainly good things about this novel. James is good at describing characters' physical behaviour; he is good at describing their intense, momentary perceptions; and he is good at abstract analysis of motive. But he struggles in lending motive narrative life; as a consequence of which, many of his characters sound exactly the same as each other when they speak - which is often in an irritatingly mannered, facetious style peppered with arid word play.
None of this would matter so much if the book wasn't so damn long - I devoted six months of my reading life to it! After all, not all that much actuallyhappen in it. James' overriding problem, I think, is that he loves the sound of his own voice, even when it's not actually saying very much.
Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy
Bonkers. Tristram Shandy is one of the oddest books I've read, Sterne outweirding many self-consciously "modern" writers of later ages.
The narrator, Tristram Shandy, starts telling his life story, but veers off into a 500-page set of digressions, and digressions within digressions, never to return. The novel ends without Tristram having been born.
The digressions are mostly whimsical anecdotes about Tristram's father and Uncle Toby. Many bawdy gags are told (interestingly, Sterne was a clergyman) and the whole thing is a bit of a grin.
Does it have a message? Only perhaps that we should go wherever our imaginations take us
Strangely, for all its humour, the novel's small cast of characters gives it a rather claustrophobic atmosphere. So for sheer feel-good factor, I'd choose something else.
Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina
Many years since I read this. It tells the story of a beautiful aristocratic woman who deserts her conventional, unattractive husband for the dashing Count Vronsky, to the opprobrium of society. In an almost entirely unrelated strand, introspective landowner Levin navel-gazes and worries and gets married.
My response to this novel mirrored that to War and Peace. I found it intermittently gripping, but with protracted sections (mostly those about Levin) that were something of a yawn. It did leave me doubting whether realism should ever be regarded as the highest artistic ideal.
War and Peace
A while since I read this, so I can't remember much about it. It traces the lives of loads of Russian aristos during the period of the Napoleonic wars. For the most part, the novel steers scrupulously clear of purveying any kind of personal message from the author. The aim is both more humble and more gigantic than this: to portray a tableau of human life in all its richness, with all its inconsistencies and contradictions intact.
It would be presumptuous for an insignificant little technical author like me to praise the novel's brilliance and insight; what I must confess, though, is that there are many lesser novels that I have enjoyed more. It was never Tolstoy's aim to create a drama out of human life: a key part of his project, a cynic might say, was to keep the dull bits in. So while one can't fault the novel's lack of narrative pace, I don't think one can deny it either. Additionally, the resolute stylistic neutrality precludes much sense of intimacy with the author, to leave one feeling ultimately rather cold - one is, as it were, presented with a glorious edifice to admire, but never invited in for a drink with its owner.
Well, not until the end, anyway: but then the drink is not profered for consumption so much as thrown in the visitor's face. Here Tolstoy launches on an extended, profoundly subjective rant about the place of great men in history. Those commonly held up as great men, he insists, are merely tools of some indefinable 'power that moves nations': he tries to explain history as an abstract, pseudoscientific process that is entirely divorced from human psychology. At least, I think he does: it's very difficult to wring any sense out of his sophistic convolutions. Anyway his underlying aim is very clearly to explode the cult of personality surrounding Napoleon and try to make everyone see that it's Russia, not France, that is the Great Nation. Not very objective at all, really.
That said, extensive though the latter drivel is, it occupies only a tiny fraction of this 1400-page literary doorstep. I think the best way to enjoy the novel, if you're a tortoise like me, is to read it in sections over several months, throwing in pacier reads in between.
Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons
Young Bazarov becomes a Nihilist and rejects everything: his family, politics, love. Or so he thinks. But against his will and his principles, he falls in love with a woman who messes him about something rotten. Things get grim.
The central question of this novel is whether rejecting everything in the world - however rotten, corrupt and empty we consider that world to be - can lead to anything but our own spiritual annihilation. It is an immensely sad and moving novel; and at the same time, its ambiguous protagonist Bazarov is endlessly intriguing.
Readable and haunting
First Love
A brief novella about a teenager's first romantic crush. It's OK, but there are many better books around that deal with the same themes. It's all a bit melodramatic and over-ripe; not a patch on Fathers and Sons. It's short though.