Book Review 021 / Middlemarch by George Eliot / A Review

 

Middlemarch 

by George Eliot

1871-2 

[A Review]

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The 100 best novels / No 21 / Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

Dorothea, admiring this ambition, hopes that in marriage she will be a true partner to Casaubon, helping to complete his life’s work.

Those who have great thoughts get too much worn in working them out. I used to feel about that, even when I was a little girl; and it always seemed to me that the use I should like to make of my life would be to help some one who did great works, so that his burthen might be lighter.

But Casaubon, who has probably never before desired a wife, is reluctant to share the world of his work with anyone.

Book Review 022 / The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope

 

The Way We Live Now

 by Anthony Trollope

1875

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The 100 best novels / No 22 / The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (1875)

One-line summary: A grand Victorian melodrama with all of Austen's cynical wit and Sinclair's scathing social critique.

Originally published in 1875. Approximately 353,000 words (800 pages).  

In this world of bribes and vendettas, swindling and suicide, in which heiresses are won like gambling stakes, Trollope's characters embody all the vices: Lady Carbury, a 43-year-old coquette, 'false from head to foot'; her son Felix, with the 'instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog'; and Melmotte, the colossal figure who dominates the book, a 'horrid, big, rich scoundrel...a bloated swindler...a vile city ruffian'.

Book Review 023 / The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn 

by Mark Twain 

1884/5

 Alive at 100

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The 100 best novels / No 23 / The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

Norman Mailer
9 December 1984

Is there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In 19th-century Russia, ''Anna Karenina'' was received with the following: ''Vronsky's passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna'' . . . ''Sentimental rubbish'' . . . ''Show me one page,'' says The Odessa Courier, ''that contains an idea.'' ''Moby-Dick'' was incinerated: ''Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met with before in marine literature'' . . . ''Sheer moonstruck lunacy'' . . . ''Sad stuff. Mr. Melville's Quakers are wretched dolts and drivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.''

Book Review 024 / Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Kidnapped

 by Robert Louis Stevenson

1886

Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Kidnapped’ is not just an adventure tale, it’s a timely novel about politics and dissent 

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The 100 best novel / No 24 / Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Michael Dirda

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” appeared in 1886, the same year as “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and just three years after “Treasure Island.” According to the Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, it is “one of the most brilliant adventure stories of all times”— and that’s no exaggeration. Yet “Kidnapped” is also more than just exciting and more than just a kids’ book; it’s a thoughtful novel about politics and dissent, rich in moral complexity, and, for a reader in 2021, weirdly contemporary at times. It’s also beautifully written, the occasional Scots word or phrase contributing to its peaty flavor.

Review Book 025 / Three Men in a Boat (not to mention the dog) by Jerome K Jerome 1889

 

Three Men in a Boat (not to mention the dog)

  by Jerome K Jerome

 1889

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The 100 best novels / No 25 / Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome (1889)

Mildly amusing. Whimsical. Harmless  These are the words that come to mind when I reflect on the experience of reading this Victorian “classic”. For some reason, while many comic novels age appallingly, Three Men in a Boat seems bullet-proof against the passage of time. It is feather-light – there is no plot to speak of, very few events, no characterisation, or only the barest. The title sums up pretty much all you need to know about the novel – three middle class single men of indeterminate age or occupation take a short trip in a rowing boat up the Thames. It rains. They fall in occasionally. The narrator tells several stories of similar incidents on similar trips. These stories all follow the same pattern – the principal character is hugely over-confident in his own abilities – to sail, hang a picture, pack a bag, navigate a maze etc. – and retains this over-confidence in the face of every failure.

Review / The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

 

The Sign of Four

 by Arthur 

Conan Doyle 

1890

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The 100 best novels / No 26 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

John Pistelli
23 February 2016

Halfway through The Sign of Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle steals the literary critic’s thunder by aptly “theorizing,” as we used to say in grad school, the novel’s own genre through two minor characters:

“It is a romance!” cried Mrs. Forrester. “An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl.”

“And two knight-errants to the rescue,” added Miss Morstan, with a bright glance at me.

 

The late Victorian period saw a general revival of romance in Britain, for a variety of reasons: the ideological and commercial collapse of the three-volume realist novel; the increasingly martial cultural tone of an expanding empire; the reaction against the previous dominance of female authors and female modes (domestic realism, sentimentalism) in fiction; and the rise of a newly literate, non-classically educated audience seeking more adventurous fare. (I derive my information from such useful literary histories as Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy and Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island.)

Doyle’s myth-making imagination scored an undeniable triumph with the invention of the maven of deduction, Sherlock Holmes, and his more practical partner, Watson. But aside from this, he lacked the virtues of his fellow romancers. He could not write the perfect prose of Stevenson or Kipling, nor philosophize over his own phantasmagoria as Wilde could, nor embody in vividly imagined tales whole new concepts of time and nature like Wells; even Stoker’s Dracula, while a bit schlocky, is prodigiously imagined and intricately composed. I find Doyle’s narrative gifts and his style weaker—at least in the first two Holmes novels—and cannot bring myself to care much about the story or characters.

 

 

The Sign of Four, a complicated mystery involving the schemes of various parties to acquire treasure that a British army officer mysteriously won in India, is mainly interesting today for what I might call “cultural studies” reasons. That is, it fascinates readers for what it suggests about late-19th-century British attitudes toward drugs, race, empire, law enforcement, homosocial relations between men, statistics, etc. I imagine the scene where Holmes deduces a killer’s identity from his footprint, complete with a lengthy pseudo-scientific racialist disquisition on the characteristics of various non-Western people’s feet (“The Hindoo proper has long and thin feet”—who knew?) has launched a dissertation or two.

But even I am not immune: as a student of aestheticism, I was interested in Doyle’s portrayal of Thaddeus Sholto, son of the major who brought the jewels back from India. In Sholto, Doyle provides an amusing caricature of the aesthete, an ineffectual and hypochondriacal lovers of the beautiful; and Doyle, in his bluff way, communicates directly what Pater and Wilde never quite get around to telling us, namely, that the aesthete is able to enjoy his refined pleasures only because he sits at the pinnacle of an imperial hierarchy (I think I learned somewhere or other that Edward Said, whom I have had cause to mention here before, re-read the Holmes stories on his deathbed).

But Holmes’s disinterested gaze knits the seeming chaos of crime into patterns that are pleasurable for the reader to behold: he is only another kind of aesthete (he is called in this novel a “connoisseur of crime”), which is no doubt why we find him, on this novel’s famous first page, in the languid Huysmans-esque pursuit of intoxication:

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

And there is also some fine atmospheric writing about London here; not as good as Dickens, but moody and dream-like:

It was a September evening, and not yet seven o’clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,—sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more.

 

Arthur Conan Doyle

    

The novel ends with a long narrative from the main villain explaining the background to the crime. His narrative is an imperial romance within the detective romance, a tale of desperation, greed, and betrayal amid the upheavals of the Sepoy rebellion. The villain’s strong will and loyalty—he is the only non-racist character in the novel, being bound in solidarity with his Sikh collaborators in crime and his Andaman islander confederate—make him a good foil for Holmes, a man of equally strong drive but also of total abstraction and misanthropy. Here is Holmes watching a shipyard empty at quitting-time:

“Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man!”

“Some one calls him a soul concealed in an animal,” I suggested.

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.”

Holmes’s utterly detached aestheticism is necessarily his readers’, since we too are reading rather than acting (on the other hand, the active villain says, “reading is not in my line”); we contemplate the abstract that is literature rather than the individuality of life. But the passion of those who have to fight or work for their lives, even at the price of their souls, is the material from which Holmes shapes his narrative designs—communicated to us by Watson, who is the author of all Holmes’s adventures. Like those heralds of modernity, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson have already read of their earlier exploits by the time this book opens. We readers and writers are detectives all in the ghostly city, looking with mastery but also longing (“imperial nostalgia,” it has been called) on those—poor Englishman and colonized Indian alike—whom we leave no choice but to live.

JOHN PISTELLI

Book Review 026 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle

 

The Sign of Four

by Arthur 

Conan Doyle 

1890

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The 100 best novels / No 26 / The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle (1890)

Title: The Sign of the Four

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Series:  Sherlock Holmes: Book 2

Publisher: Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine‎

Genre: Crime, Mystery, Detective Fiction

First Publication: 1890

Language: English

Major Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson, Jonathan Small, Mary Morstan, Thaddeus Sholto

Setting Place: late 19th century London

Narration: First person

Preceded by: A Study in Scarlet

Followed by: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

 

Book Summary: The Sign of the Four

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street.

Book Review 027 / The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray 

by Oscar Wilde

1891

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The 100 best novels / No 27 / The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

3 DECEMBER 2015

I know I don’t normally write about the publication history of the books I review, but the background to this one is more complex than usual, and quite relevant. It was published in full in Lippincott’s Monthly magazine in 1890 (in a significantly shorter version than the final novel). Wilde predicted “I think it will make a sensation” – which was a bit of an understatement. Prior to publication he made several edits to remove some of the more explicitly homo-erotic content, but he may as well not have bothered, because critics almost unanimously put two and two together, identified Wilde with his two main characters, and realised that some of the sins which they explore included gay sex. For the avoidance of any doubts Wilde drops clunking hints such as when he says “there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex…they are forced to have more than one life” (61) What can he mean? Later he refers to “such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself” (96). This was extraordinarily daring of Wilde – and his publishers – and he was of course to pay the price.

Book Review 028 / New Grub Street by George Gissing

 

New Grubb Street

 by George Gissing

1891

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The 100 best novels / No 28 / New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891)

Kate Vane

January 25, 2021

This is one of my occasional series where I share my thoughts on the whole of a book, so if you don’t want to know how it ends, look away now …

New Grub Street was first published in 1891 but its account of the struggles of a group of London writers resonates today.

Book Review 029 / Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

 

Jude the Obscure 

by Thomas Hardy

1895 

[A Review]

BIOGRAPHY

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The 100 best novels / No 29 / Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

Jason Fernandes

Jude the Obscure was Thomas Hardy’s final novel. In it you will find all of Hardy’s trademarks – an intelligent, frustrated heroine; encroaching modernity and tragedy in love. Jude, though, is a far darker and more provocative novel from Hardy, inviting scandal for its attacks on social and religious conventions.