Finished reading “Of Human Bondage”
Bit of a slog. Not sure what I think, whether Maugham was edging toward an unreliable narrator story (we're told repeatedly that Philip Carey now thinks he's free - of religion, of class conventions, of love, etc., when we can see he isn't - presumably hence the title), or whether the distance you feel between Carey and real emotion was actually Maugham trying to inject passion into a story of love between a man and woman, when his personal history shows he was about a 5 on the Kinsey scale (mostly gay; he did marry a woman and father a child, but the marriage is generally described as unhappy to disastrous and all his serious relationships were with men). So although a major thread of the story is Carey's obsession with a woman, I think Maugham fails to make the reader feel it, or the reasons for it. Toward the end of the book - spoiler alert here - you're led to believe Carey's only been going for walks and chats with a new woman, so that his concern that he might have made her pregnant comes out of left field. I'm not saying the book needed sex scenes but Maugham's calibration of how a man would frame and present a relationship with a woman seems a little off.
I'm sure a ton of criticism and exposition exists for this novel, but I'm not too interested in chasing it down. There's some nice bits of description of the English countryside toward the end, but although most of it takes place in London I don't sense the metropolis around most scenes in the book. Likewise, although Carey studies medicine and eventually qualifies as a doctor - as Maugham did himself - the personal impact of a medical education at the turn of the last century feels muted. Only once or twice do we feel Maugham lurching toward a gentleman's response to squalor, rather as Orwell does a couple of decades later when in Wigan or on the road, but it's not told nearly so vividly.
Philip Carey has no interest in politics or sociology and, after he gives up art, little engagement with anything anyone else is doing around him, or how they got the way they did. A strange gap for a major novelist, especially since this novel is generally regarded as largely autobiographical. A novelist needs to be interested in other people and what makes them tick. Philip Carey hardly seems interested even in what makes him tick himself.
(Query: Could this be because Maugham was formed as a writer before the advent of Freud's ideas?)
Enh. Three stars out of five. Still considered a classic, but I thought his The Painted Veil much more effective as a novel.
I'm sure a ton of criticism and exposition exists for this novel, but I'm not too interested in chasing it down. There's some nice bits of description of the English countryside toward the end, but although most of it takes place in London I don't sense the metropolis around most scenes in the book. Likewise, although Carey studies medicine and eventually qualifies as a doctor - as Maugham did himself - the personal impact of a medical education at the turn of the last century feels muted. Only once or twice do we feel Maugham lurching toward a gentleman's response to squalor, rather as Orwell does a couple of decades later when in Wigan or on the road, but it's not told nearly so vividly.
Philip Carey has no interest in politics or sociology and, after he gives up art, little engagement with anything anyone else is doing around him, or how they got the way they did. A strange gap for a major novelist, especially since this novel is generally regarded as largely autobiographical. A novelist needs to be interested in other people and what makes them tick. Philip Carey hardly seems interested even in what makes him tick himself.
(Query: Could this be because Maugham was formed as a writer before the advent of Freud's ideas?)
Enh. Three stars out of five. Still considered a classic, but I thought his The Painted Veil much more effective as a novel.