"Morvern Callar" by Alan Warner

One day, Morvern, a 21 year old girl in a Scottish port town, finds her boyfriend dead. Suicided, it would seem, wrist half hacked off by a meat cleaver, throat cut, note on the computer. She ought to report him dead but somehow instead she goes to work and then, it being Christmas Eve, to a wild party where she has sex with two boys and her best girl friend, and then ...

It is written in Scottish dialect (it took me a while to remember that 'greeting' means wailing). It is powerful and bleak. It reminded me of Eros Island by Tony Hanania in the wonderful use of language and the nihilistic and sybaritic lifestyle of the young people, although it is told in linear chronology and is therefore rather easier to understand.

It is one of those books that, as I read it, seemed to skim off me but I think that there will be aspects of Morvern's desperate seeking after pleasure in the face of brutal reality that I will remember time and time again. This is definitely a book to revisit.

Great lines included:

• “The hidden fact of our world is that theres no point in having desire unless youve money. Every desire is transformed into sour dreams. You get told if you work hard you get money but most work hard and end up with nothing. ... Theres no freedom, no liberty; theres just money. That's the world we've made ... We live off each other's necessities and fancy names for bare faced robbery.” (Punctuation as in the book.)
• "I'd forgot to get something for diluting the voddy and of course the fridge was bare so I opened this bottle of sweet wine and used that to dilute it.”
• “There was a strip of this queer volcanic rock, small pools of water and roundish nodules of stone. It was like the coast had melted then gone hard again.”

August 2019; 229 pages

Written in 1995. Morvern also appears in These Demented Lands (1997) and The Sopranos (1998), also by Alan Warner.

Made into a movie in 2002

"Religion for atheists" by Alain de Botton

This wonderful book ends with the statement that: “The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of mankind, even the most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful, effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone.” (10.iii.3) It proposes that the secular world learns how religions pass on their message, which is, after all, a message intended to support the fragile human psyche through its many times of troubles, in order to enable such support without the use of the supernatural. He asserts that religions are fundamentally false (“No one intent on starting a new religion from scratch in the modern era would dream of proposing anything as hoary and improbable as the rituals and precepts bequeathed to us by our ancestors.”; 10.ii.1), that they were invented, but he then suggests that: “We invented religions to serve two central needs ... first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and too our decay and demise.” (1.2) Given that these needs still exist, we need to develop secular systems which will promote social harmony and support vulnerable individuals without the mumbo-jumbo.

Then, in eloquent writing which sometimes reaches the heights of lyrical beauty, he proposes how this can be done.

Community
“One of the losses modern society feels most keenly is that of a sense of community. We tend to imagine that there once existed a degree of neighbourliness which has been replaced by ruthless anonymity.” (2.i.1) He recognises that this is partly due to overcrowding: “Whereas the Bedouin whose tent surveys a hundred kilometres of desolate sand has the psychological wherewithal to offer each stranger a warm welcome, his urban contemporaries, though at heart no less well meaning or generous, must - in order to preserve a modicum of inner serenity - give no sign of even noticing the millions of humans eating, sleeping, arguing, copulating and dying only centimetres away from them all sides.” (2.i.2)  But churches are places where strangers from all walks of life meet. Often they are beautiful places. People are instructed to move together: when to kneel, when to stand or sit, when to sing together, when to listen. Importantly, the weakest are welcomed as well as the strongest. And he points out that the Christian mass began as a meal: “Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and off benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However the proximity required by a meal ... disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted.” (2.i.6) 

Apologies

AdB suggests that we institutionalize apologies, as with the Jewish Day of Atonement or the Catholic Confession. He suggests that we are all nasty in some ways to other people and this causes two lots of suffering:

• “As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. It appals our reason to face up to how much we suffer from the missing invitation or the unanswered letter, how many hours of torment we've given to the unkind remark.” (2.ii.2)
• If we have offended we may “feel intolerably guilty” so that we “run away from our victims and act with strange rudeness towards them” so making them suffer twice. (2.ii.2)

One problem is that we don't like being told we are naughty by someone else. It provokes the 'who do you think you are' response and one of the flaws of religions is that often the priest is promoted as Mr Perfect Pants. “Among religions’ more unpalatable features is the tendency of their clergies to speak to people as if they, and they alone, were in possession of maturity and moral authority.” (3.i.7) AdB argues that the concept of Original Sin is that we are all flawed. “The doctrine of original sin encourages us to inch towards moral improvement by understanding the faults we despise in ourselves are inevitable features of the species. We can therefore admit to them candidly and attempt to rectify them in the light of day. The doctrine knows that shame is not a helpful emotion for us to be weighed down with as we work towards having a little less to be ashamed about.”. (3.i.7)

He then proposes that in order to get the message across we need to institutionalize the secular church. He shows how institutions have vastly more wealth, and power, and influence than even the greatest individual thinker. He contrasts the cottage industry of wellness gurus with the brand recognition of the church. He suggests we advertise our secular beliefs by beautiful paintings, for example, and by beautiful architecture. (I take issue with his idea that beauty somehow equates with goodness: there is sufficient cult today of beautiful people and the downside of beauty = goodness is to suggest that the ugly should be shunned; besides, his two pictures contrasting a protestant chapel with a Roman Catholic chapel are presumably intended to suggested that the lush ornamentation of the RC ceiling is preferable whereas I personally prefer the elegance of the protestant building; beauty is even more individual perhaps than ethics.)

He considers the universities should have the duty to teach courses in eg How to have a successful marriage, and How to Die, and that these courses should be illustrated with extracts from great literature but he sees that the present universities have missed their way by considering literature as texts to be studied rather than improving moral works: “We are by no means lacking in material which we might call into service to replace the holy texts; we are simply treating that material in the wrong way. We are unwilling to consider secular culture ... as a source of guidance.” (4.i.4) “The redesigned universities of the future would draw upon the same rich catalogue of culture treated by their traditional counterparts ... but they would teach this material with a view to illuminating students lives ... Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would that be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage ... Epicurus and Seneca would appear in a syllabus for a course about dying.” (4.i.7)

He also suggests that universities, by relying on a single method of transmission, the (often boring) lecture, have missed the goal. 

• “Christianity pictures the mind as a sluggish and fickle organ ... the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas which we have already fully understood at a theoretical level. It follows the Greek sophists in insisting that all lessons should appeal to both reason (logos) and emotion (pathos)” (4.ii.1) 
• “Ever since Plato attacked the Greek sophists for being more concerned with speaking well than thinking honestly, Western intellectuals have been intransigently suspicious of eloquence.” (4.ii.2)
• “Secular education will never succeed in reaching its potential until humanities lecturers are sent to be trained by African-American Pentecostal preachers.” (4.ii.3)

Finally he proposes that we lack perspective, being insufficiently pessimistic about our powerlessness in the face of the cosmos. This is interesting given that others suggest that it was the Coperbnican revolution that displaced mankind and the earth from its position of centrality in the Universe. But de Botton states:

•  “Our secular world ... surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history” (7.2)
• “Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.” (7.3) 

Other important ideas

• “In the past, we got to know others because we have no option but to ask them for help” because there were no social safety nets. “We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of that income for the common good” but this is through taxation which tends to leave us resentful imagining that “our money is being used to support unnecessary bureaucracies” rather than considering “those less fortunate members of the policy for whom our taxes also buy clean sheets, soup, shelter or a daily dose of insulin.” (2.i.2)
• We get our ideas of strangers from the media so we think “that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles” although when disasters strike and we are actually vulnerable “we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.” (2.i.2)
• “The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert - all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition.” (2.i.3)
• “It is hard to attend most wedding parties without realising that these celebrations are at some level also marking a sorrow, the entombment of sexual liberty and individual curiosity for the sake of children and social stability, with compensation from the community being delivered through gifts and speeches.” (2.iii.3)
• “Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together.” 
• “Freedom has become our supreme political virtue ...the state should harbour no aspirations to tinker with the inner well-being or outward manners of its members.” (3.i.1)
• “ Heady romantic longings are fragile materials with which to construct a relationship. We grow thoughtless and mendacious towards each other. We surprise ourselves with our rudeness. We become deceitful and vindictive.” (3.i.5)
• “It seems clear that the origins of religious ethics lay in the pragmatic need of the earliest communities to control their members’ tendencies towards violence, and to foster in them contrary habits of harmony and forgiveness. Religious codes began as cautionary precepts, which were then projected into the sky and reflected back to earth in disembodied and majestic forms ... But if we can now own up to spiritualising our ethical laws, we have no cause to do away with the laws themselves. ... We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves ... who want to live the sort of life which we want imagine supernatural beings demanded of us.” (3.i.6)
• “We will never discover cast-iron rules of good conduct which will answer every question that might arise about how human beings can live peacefully and well together.” (3.1.8)
• “We would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. ... Rudeness and emotional humiliation maybe just as corrosive to a well-functioning society as robbery and murder.” (3.1.8)
• “Consider ... how belatedly and how bluntly the modern state enters into our lives ... It intervenes when it is already far too late, after we have picked up the gun.” (3.i.8)
• “Literature, previously dismissed as being worthy of study only by adolescent girls and convalescents, was recognised as a serious subject ... The newfound prestige of novels and poems was based on the realization that these forms, much like the Gospels, could deliver complex moral messages embedded within emotionally charged narratives, and therefore prompt affective identification and self-examination.” (4.i.4)
• “There is in truth no maturity without an adequate negotiation with the infantile and no such thing as a grown-up who does not regularly yearn to be comforted like a child.” (5.3)
• “If there is a problem with Christianity’s approach, it is that ... the need for comfort has come to be overly identified with a need for Mary herself, instead of being seen for what it really is: an eternal appetite which began long before the Gospels, originating at the very moment when the first child was picked up by his or her mother and soothed amid the darkness and cold of the first underground cave.” (5.4)
• “The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings ... are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.” (7.2)
• “Tourists making their way around some of the world's great museums ... appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.” (8.2)
• “Art ...is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls.” (8.3)
• “The unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.” (8.5)
• “If our bodies were immune to pain or decay, we would be monsters.” (8.5)
• “There are places which by virtue of their remoteness, solitude, beauty or cultural richness retain an ability to salve the wounded parts of us.” (9.3)
• “Romanticism has taught us to mock the ponderousness and strictures of institutions, their tendencies to corruption and the tolerance of mediocrity. The ideal of the intellectual has been that of a free spirit living beyond the confines of any system, disdainful of money, and cut off from practical affairs.” (10.i.1)
• “Why should only phones and shampoos benefit from coherent retail identities?” (10.i.3)
• “Because we are embodied creatures - sensory animals as well as rational beings - we stand to be lastingly influenced by concepts only when they come at us through a variety of channels ... in what we wear, eat, sing, decorate our houses with and bathe in.” (10.i.4)

An incredibly thought-provoking (and timely) book. Beautifully written, both easy to read and lyrical, and with many illustrations who, together with their captions, add a considerable amount to the text,

Alain de Botton has also written How Proust can change your life

August 2019; 312

"The Spinning Heart" by Donal Ryan

This book was longlisted for the Booker and the Guardian First Book Award in 2013; it won Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards in 2012.

Eire following the financial crisis. One moment houses were being built all over the place, the next no one wants to buy them. Pokey Burke's building firm has gone bust, leaving a whole community full of unemployed men who hadn't realised Pokey wasn't paying their stamps or their tax and a ghost estate with just two inhabited houses.

This is a tale told by many different people. It starts with Bobby Mahon, Pokey's foreman and all round good guy except that he hates his father. It encompasses Pokey's father, who gave the building firm to his son when he retired, and Pokey's lesbian sister. It includes the town whore who sent her son to law school. It includes Realtin, the young girl living in one of the two houses with her son, Dylan, and Dylan's father, local lothario Seanie Shaper. It includes the corner and cost-cutting owner of the day care nursery which Dylan attends, and the male Montessori-qualified teacher who gets a job at the nursery, and his computer-game addicted friend. It ends with Bobby's wife.

Almost half way through Bobby's father is murdered and Dylan is kidnapped. Of course we want to know whodunnit, and is the kid OK? But these plot-chasing urges are secondary to the joy of listening to these tangled testimonies from a close-knit town whose ideas of what is right and what is wrong are being challenged by the shock of the recession.

Beautiful writing.

Selected quotes:

• “My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead. Every day he lets me down. He hasn't yet missed a day of letting me down. He smiles at me; that terrible smile. He knows I'm coming to check is he dead.” (Bobby)
• “There are many ways, you know, to kill a man, especially an old, frail man, which wouldn't look like murder. It wouldn't be murder anyway, just putting the skids under nature.” (Bobby)
• “They loved him, or loved the thought of him, what they thought he was: a man who could easily have had a good life who chose instead their life: spite and bitterness and age-fogged glasses of watery whiskey in dark, cobwebbed country bars, shit-smeared toilets, blood-streaked piss, and early death. He could have helped it but didn't. They couldn't help it and loved him for being worse than them. He was the king of the wasters. He bought drink for men he didn't like and listen to their yarns and their sodden stories.” (Bobby)
• “Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything.” (Bobby)
• "Here am I, like an orphaned child, bereft, filling up with the fear like a boat filling with water.” (Bobby)
• “Isn't it a secret duty, to rear your children? I got that all turned around in my head, of course. I confused providing for them with rearing them. I got a fixation on work and having enough money that waxed and waned for my whole adult life, but was always there.” (Josie)
• “Pokey ...had a ledger inside his head in which every single move I made was entered, and it never, ever balanced in his favour.” (Josie)
• “She thought I couldn't understand. She was right and wrong: I didn't know the words, just their meaning.” (Vasya)
• “The Irish men would look at me in mock astonishment and then look at each other and roar with laughter ... I would feel happy, and then remember to be ashamed of myself for being a clown to please other men.” (Vasya)
• “It kills Daddy not to be able to talk to him about hurling and cars and machinery and whatever men do be fascinated by when they're not ruining women's lives.” (Realtin)
• “We're all afraid of our lives of upsetting our parents. Why is it at all? Why have we to be bound by this fear of the feelings of others?” (Brian)
• “Schizophrenia is splitting in two and then falling to pieces.” (Trevor)
• “I know I shouldn't think these things over and over again but you may as well ask a bee to leave the flowers alone.” (Bridie)
• “I still believe I did good work at the convent with those unfortunate young ladies. I made them feel good about themselves and showed them how to give a handjob without rupturing a man's helmet.That's a valuable lifeskill.” (Seanie)
• “I'd say your man just wanted a job where he wouldn't have to be near manly men, spitting and farting talking about their balls and making each other feel like shit about themselves. Why do fellas do that? They’re always slagging each other and calling each other queer and trying to outdo each other like fools.” (Kate)
• “Sweat is fine when it's fresh, on lovely hard muscle, but when it's dripping off a big flabby man-boob or dried into a filthy T-shirt it's a different thing altogether.” (Kate)
• “What would Jesus have done? ... How would I know what Jesus would have done?That fella was a mass of contradictions as far as I can see. One minute he says to turn the other cheek, the next minute he's having a big strop and kicking over lads’ market stalls. He says blessed are the meek and he goes round shouting and roaring the odds to everyone. He rises from the dead and then shags off a few weeks later and leaves his buddies in the shit.” (Rory)
• “Leaving the herd isn’t safe. You’re the loose gazelle that the lion will chase.” (Mags)
• “There’s no man on this earth can even be assured he'll have a next day.” (Frank)
• “He spent a whole day with his bony arse in the air as he chipped and hacked and sanded, an acute angle of unnatural adolescent concentration.” (Triona)
• “Some people, like Bobby, take on the troubles of others and others can't see anything past their own.” (Triona)
• "Jesus, the sweet scandal, it must have been almost too rich for their pill-thinned blood." (Triona)

August 2019; 156 pages

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Last Post" by Ford Madox Ford

This is the final part of the Parade’s End tetralogy, written, apparently, in response to fans who wanted FMF to wrap up some of the looser ends in the tangled mess of family relationships that had been explored previously in Some Do Not, No More Parades, and A Man Could Stand Up

This book, set in a single place and on a single afternoon, has all the surviving major players are gathered in one place. It is a country cottage owned by Christopher Tietjens; outside on this hill under a thatched roof lies his brother Mark, owner of Groby, who is speechless either through wilfulness or as a result of a stroke he may have suffered on Armistice Day. Around this sickbed are Gunning, a servant of the family and Marie Leonie, Mark’s long time mistress and more recently his wife. To disturb him two visitors arrive: an American woman who has leased the ancestral home, Groby, and who is ostensibly seeking permission to cut down the Great Tree of Groby which is supposedly the tallest cedar in England, and the heir to Groby, Christopher’s son (although he might be the son of another man) who calls himself Mark in the family tradition although his mother, Christopher’s estranged wife Sylvia, calls him Michael. The first part of this story is told through the inner monologues of these characters.

Events start to move in the second part when Sylvia arrives with General Campion who tells her that he will not marry her and make an honest woman of her (he can’t at the moment anyway since she has so far resolutely refused to divorce Christopher and he believes a man must never divorce a woman). Sylvia attempts to go into the house where she encounters Valentine, Christopher’s mistress.

It may sound convoluted but these tensions have built up over three previous books. But FMF doesn’t have make a meal of each character going over everything again. The only one who doesn’t get a say is Christopher himself, who is away from home and only returns right at the end.

So this is a highly formal book, set over an afternoon, full of interior monologue and a little dialogue, with very little action and endless rumination in which we see the convoluted family dynamics from nearly every point of view. It isn’t a page turned unless you have so bought in to these characters that you are desperate to know what will happen next. It is supposed to resolve the family saga which it does to the satisfaction of one of the characters but perhaps not in terms of any of the others.

There are some great lines:

• “Thet cider was arder than a miser’s art or’n ole maid’s tongue. Body it ad. Strength it ad. Stans to reason. Ten year cider. Not a drop was drunk in Lordship’s ouse under ten years in cask.” (B1C1)
• “Her mind, in fact, was like a cupboard, stuffed, packed with the most incongruous materials, tools, vessels and debris. Once the door was opened you never knew what would tumble out or be followed by what.” (B1C1)
• "He was a man and it is the nature of men to treat women with treachery, lust and meanness.” (B1C1)
• “When the Sovereign died what did the Heir, his concubines, courtiers and sycophants do to the Maintenon of the day? What precautions ought she not to be taking against that wrath to come?” (B1C2)
• “The rich are noted for hardness of heart, and brother will prey upon brother’s widow sooner than on another.” (B1C2)
• “English people of good class do not dress for dinner on Sundays. That is a politeness to God, because theoretically you attend evening service and you do not go to church in the country in evening dress. As a matter of fact you never go to evening service—but it is complimentary to suggest by your dress that you might be visited by the impulse.” (B1C2)
• “Queer things the Gentry can do to you still if they notice you. It is all very well to say this is a land fit for whatever the word is that stands for simple folk. They have the police and the keepers in their hands and your cottages and livings.” (B1C3)
• “He could not imagine why anyone should dislike Marie Antoinette. Yet very likely she was dislikeable. The French, who were sensible people, had cut her head off, so they presumably disliked her.” (B1C4)
• “No doubt, twenty years of listening to the almost ceaseless but never disagreeable conversation of Marie Léonie had been a liberal education.” (B1C4)
• “days so degenerate that even the young of tom-tits could not restrain their chirpings in face of their appetites." (B1C4)
• “Christ was a sort of an Englishman, and Englishmen did not, as a rule, refuse to do their jobs.” (B1C5)
• “Marriage, if you do not regard it as a sacrament—as, no doubt, it ought to be regarded—was nothing more than a token that a couple intended to stick to each other. Nowadays people—the right people—bothered precious little about anything but that. A constant change of partners was a social nuisance; you could not tell whether you could or couldn’t invite a couple together to a tea—fight. And society existed for social functions. That was why promiscuity was no good. For social functions you had to have an equal number of men and women, or someone got left out of conversations, and so you had to know who, officially in the social sense, went with whom.”(B1C5)
• “Beauty and truth have a way of appearing to be akin” (B2C1)
• “It was as if a man should have jumped out of a frying-pan into—a duckpond.” (B2C1)
• “God is probably—and very rightly—on the side of the stuffy domesticities. Otherwise the world could not continue—the children would not be healthy. And certainly God desired the production of large crops of healthy children.” (B2C2)

August 2019

Ford Madox Ford also wrote The Good Soldier, a superb novel.

"Kipps" by H G Wells

The story of Arthur Kipps, draper's apprentice, was the book behind the musical Half A Sixpence, starring Tommy Steele. It was written by H G Wells, best known for his science fiction such as The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The Time Machine but also the author of The History of Mr Polly, Tono-Bungay and Love and Mr Lewisham. A decent biography of this remarkable man is H G Wells by Lovat Dickson.

Arthur Kipps is a "norphan" living with his aunt and uncle; he goes to school and is then sent away to be a draper's assistance in Folkestone. The misery of his servitude is chronicled until he is knocked down by a bicycle ridden by an actor with whom he gets drunk, stays out all night and is sacked from his job. It is at the depths of his misery that he is suddenly made rich and required to join posh society: his struggles to fit in and his social clangers form a great deal of the humour of this book. He becomes engaged to a posh lady but his heart still remains with the sister of his best friend when he was a boy. Veering between savage social commentary and farcical humour this delightful book chronicles the ups and downs of Kipps' life.

Kipps is explicitly a  three act drama:
The First Book (about 35% of the text) is entitled “The Making of Kipps” and charts his childhood, his education, and his apprenticeship in The Emporium. This is written quite angrily and there is some cutting social comment.

The Second Book (the next 47% of the text) shows how the Innocent (and possibly Holy) Fool Kipps is inducted into society. Other people clearly want to take advantage of his wealth. Kipps spends all his time making mistakes; he tries to fit in but every time it goes wrong. This section climaxes in an escape to London where there are scenes of farce as he tips everyone in the hotel and manages to cause an uproar with his food in the posh restaurant.

The Third Book (crammed into the last 18% of the text are some very swift turning points) follows Kipps after he and Anne have got married and how they adjust to a humbler life.

But the turning points (spoiler alert for this section) don't necessarily match these book boundaries.

• The ‘half a sixpence’ lover’s token with Anne; this incidence ends his childhood and K goes to become an apprentice: 6%
• Kipps starts the wood-carving class with Miss Walsingham: 14%
• Chitterlow the actor runs into Kipps: 19%
• Kipps gets the sack: 25%
• Kipps comes into money: 29%
• Kipps becomes engaged: 47%
• Kipps meets Anne again ... and doesn’t tell her that he is engaged: 59%
• Kipps runs away to London: 65%; he meets the socialist
• The farcical scene in the restaurant of The Grand Hotel: 71%
• Kipps encounters Ann at the Anagram Tea ... and runs away again: 74%; This follows almost immediately on from the farce.
• Kipps is reconciled with Anne and proposes: 79%
• Kipps and Anne row about the Callers: 92%
• Kipps loses all his money: 93%
• Their child is born: 97%
• Their fortunes are restored by Chitterlow: 98%

The key character is Kipps. He is the only one who is rounded, the only one to develop, the only one to have anything like a character arc. The others are mostly Dickensian-style caricatures:

• The Aunt and Uncle with their limited horizons and their stereotypical concerns: “His aunt and uncle were already high on the hill of life when first he came to them. They had married for comfort in the evening or, at any rate, in the late afternoon of their days.”
• The evil boss Mr Shalford
• The flamboyant actor Mr Chitterlow
• The cool love interest Helen Walsingham
• The childhood sweetheart Anne
• The best mate Sid

There is some lovely foreshadowing:

• “‘There's lots of young noblemen'll be glad to 'eng on to you,’ said old Kipps. ‘You mark my words. And borry your money. And then good-day to ye.’ ‘I got to be precious careful,’ said Kipps. ‘Mr Bean said that.’ ‘And you got to be precious careful of this old Bean,’ said old Kipps. ‘We may be out of the world in Noo Romney, but I've ’eard a bit about solicitors for all that. You keep your eye on old Bean me b'y. ‘’Ow do we know what 'e's up to, with your money, even now?’ said old Kipps, pursuing this uncomfortable topic. ‘’ E looked very respectable,’ said Kipps.”

One of the techniques is to describe settings by listing details as here, for example:

• “The memories Kipps carried from that school into after-life were set in an atmosphere of stuffiness and mental muddle, and included countless pictures of sitting on creaking forms bored and idle; of blot licking and the taste of ink; of torn books with covers that set one's teeth on edge; of the slimy surface of the laboured slates; of furtive marble-playing, whispered storytelling, and of pinches, blows, and a thousand such petty annoyances being perpetually ‘passed on’ according to the custom of the place; of standing up in class and being hit suddenly and unreasonably for imaginary misbehaviour; of Mr Woodrow's raving days, when a scarcely sane injustice prevailed; of the cold vacuity of the hour of preparation before the bread-and-butter breakfast; and of horrible headaches and queer, unprecedented internal feelings, resulting from Mrs Woodrow's motherly rather than intelligent cookery.”

Wells also understands about word order in sentences: “Once, just once, there was a chemistry lesson – a lesson of indescribable excitement – glass things of the strangest shape, a smell like bad eggs, something bubbling in something, a smash and stench, and Mr Woodrow saying quite distinctly – they threshed it out in the dormitory afterwards – ‘Damn!’” This last sentence is an authorial masterpiece drawing attention not just to the word order with the key word being placed at the very end of the sentence but also using that interrupt to delay the single word climax.

There were laugh out loud moments. The scene in which Kipps, alone in London, causes havoc in the restaurant of the Grand Hotel is a scene of classic farce.

Wells is scornful of the school to which Kipps goes:

• “In a glass cupboard in the passage were several shillingsworth of test-tubes and chemicals, a tripod, a glass retort, and a damaged Bunsen burner, manifesting that the ‘Scientific laboratory’ mentioned in the prospectus was no idle boast.
• “there was much furtive foul language”
• “‘Sundays are our happiest days,’ was one of Woodrow's formulae with the inquiring parent, but Kipps was not called in evidence. They were to him terrible gaps of inanity, no work, no play – a drear expanse of time with the mystery of church twice and plum-duff 18 once in the middle. The afternoon was given up to furtive relaxations, among which ‘Torture Chamber’ games with the less agreeable weaker boys figured. ... It was from the difference between this day and common days that Kipps derived his first definite conceptions of the nature of God and heaven. His instinct was to evade any closer acquaintance as long as he could.”

There is some very anti-capitalist rhetoric. This is placed into the mouths of two characters, one a fellow apprentice with Kipps and one a consumptive old man living with Sid. This second, which is extensive, is immediately followed by the farcical scene in the Grand Hotel which itself is immediately followed by the crisis in Kipps' love life. So although Wells allows himself some pages to rant he is aware that he must return pretty swiftly to his story.

• “‘When you get too old to work they chuck you away ... we're in a blessed drain-pipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.’”
• “This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom. Neither – though force of that came home to him later–might he dream of effectual love and marriage.”
• “Night after night he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse or drown himself, and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine.”
• “money, like everything else – is a deception and a disappointment.”
• “people think there is a class or order somewhere just above them or just below them, or a country or place somewhere that is really safe and happy… . The fact is, Society is one body, and it is either well or ill.”
• “we're going to have a pretty acute attack of universal confusion. Universal confusion. Like one of those crushes when men are killed and maimed for no reason at all, going into a meeting or crowding for a train. Commercial and Industrial Stresses. Political Exploitation. Tariff Wars. Revolutions. All the bloodshed that will come of some fools calling half the white world yellow. These things alter the attitude of everybody to everybody. Everybody's going to feel 'em. Every fool in the world panting and shoving. We're all going to be as happy and comfortable as a household during a removal.”
• “To-day ... the world is ruled by rich men; they may do almost anything they like with the world. And what are they doing? Laying it waste!”
• “They grudge us our schools, they grudge us a gleam of light and air, they cheat us, and then seek to forget us.”
• “Our multitudes of poverty increase, and this crew of rulers makes no provision, foresees nothing, anticipates nothing!”
• “I found myself at thirteen being forced into a factory like a rabbit into a chloroformed box. Thirteen! – when their children are babies. But even a child of that age could see what it meant, that Hell of a factory! Monotony and toil and contempt and dishonour! And then death.”

There is a lot of stuff about behaving in polite society ... and the perils of failure:

• “It was clear his only chance of concealing his bottomless baseness was to hold his tongue”
• “It had not yet come to Kipps to acknowledge any man as his better in his heart of hearts. When one does that the game is played, and one grows old indeed.”
• “The rug, the fender, the mantel and mirror, conspired with great success to make him look a trivial and intrusive little creature amidst their commonplace hauteur, and his own shadow on the opposite wall seemed to think everything a great lark, and mocked and made tremendous fun of him…”
• “Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth – that the path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.”
• “Outwardly calm, or at most a little flushed and ruffled, inwardly Kipps was a horrible, tormented battleground of scruples, doubts, shames, and self-assertions”
• “At his departure Kipps, with a hot face, convulsive gestures, and an embittered heart, tipped everyone who did not promptly and actively resist, including an absent-minded South African diamond merchant who was waiting in the hall for his wife.”
• “‘You ain't comfortable, my gel, in this world, not if you don't live up to your position,’”

Some great lines:

• “At meals ... one had to say one's ‘grace,’ hold one's spoon and fork in mad, unnatural ways called ‘properly,’ and refrain from eating even nice sweet things ‘too fast.’”
• “Once his aunt gave him a trumpet if he would promise faithfully not to blow it, and afterwards took it away again.”
• “Rye and Winchelsea perched like dream-cities on their little hills.”
• “They had not kissed, but all the guilt of kissing was between them.”
• “By the nature of his training he was indistinct in his speech, confused in his mind, and retreating in his manners.”
• “His conception of a satisfactory municipal life was to ‘keep down the rates.’”
• “He had developed a sort of idea that going to church had a tendency to alleviate life.”
• “Certain things remained quite clearly, and as it is a matter of common knowledge that intoxicated people forget what happens to them, it follows that he was not intoxicated.”
• “He felt that telling was the thing to make this business real.”
• “Everybody walked about backward at court he knew, when not actually on their knees.”
• “Turning over the pages of the Physiology again, he came upon a striking plate, in which a youth of agreeable profile displayed his interior in an unstinted manner to the startled eye. It was a new view of humanity altogether for Kipps, and it arrested his mind. ‘Chubes,’ he whispered. ‘Chubes!’”
• “Whenever he thought of any extensive change in a play he was writing, he always took a day off. In the end it saved time to do so. It prevented his starting rashly upon work that might have to be re-written. There was no good in doing work when you might have to do it over again, none whatever.”
• “No doubt this was seeing life, but had he particularly wanted to see life that day?”
• “‘You'd hardly believe,’ Coote said, ‘how much you can get out of books. Provided you avoid trashy reading, that is. You ought to make a rule, Kipps, and read one Serious Book a week. Of course we can Learn even from Novels, Nace Novels that is, but it isn't the same thing as serious reading. I made a rule, One Serious Book and One Novel – no more.”
• “Kipps descended to tea in that state of nervous apprehension at the difficulties of eating and drinking that his Aunt's knuckle rappings had implanted in him for ever.”
• “Room to swing a cat, it seemed, was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.”
• “He loved Helen, he revered Helen. He was also beginning to hate her with some intensity.”
• “He knew that wherever you were, so soon as you were thoroughly lost, you said ‘Hi!’ to a cab, and then ‘Royal Grend Hotel.’ Day and night these trusty conveyances are returning the strayed Londoner back to his point of departure, and were it not for their activity, in a little while the whole population, so vast and incomprehensible is the intricate complexity of this great city, would be hopelessly lost for ever.”
• “His soul looked out upon life in general as a very small nestling might peep out of its nest. What an extraordinary thing life was to be sure, and what a remarkable variety of people there were in it!”
• “He found that a fork in his inexperienced hand was an instrument of chase rather than capture.”
• “They meditated upon replicas of classical statuary without excessive comment. Kipps said, at large, it must have been a queer world then; but Ann very properly doubted if they really went about like that.”
• “‘I wonder 'ow all these old antediluvium animals got extinct,’ he asked. ‘No one couldn't possibly 'ave killed 'em.’ ‘Why, I know that!’ said Ann. ‘They was overtook by the Flood… .’ Kipps meditated for a while. ‘But I thought they had to take two of everything there was—’ ‘Within reason they 'ad,'”
• “‘Why do I never get anything right?’ Kipps asked of a bright implacable universe.”

This is a story with some moments of anger, some very funny sections, and some parts where you feel so sorry for poor old Arthur Kipps, the Holy Fool. It is also a story with a lot of ups and downs and full of incident.

August 2019

Other novels by H G Wells reviewed in this blog include:

• The War of the Worlds
• The Time Machine
• Tono-Bungay
• Love and Mr Lewisham
• The History of Mr Polly
• Kipps
• The First Men in the Moon

Biographies of H G Wells reviewed in this blog:

• H G Wells by Lovat Dickson
• H G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot

Should Maggie be allowed to love whom she pleases or should she conform to the expectations of her father and her brother? A Victorian classic.

This is a long and complex novel. On one level it is autobiographical. Mary Anne Evans (‘George Eliot’) must have been very like Maggie Tulliver, a clever, headstrong and impulsive girl. Early in her life she scandalised her family when she turned atheist and something of this is reflected in Maggie’s spiritual struggle between self-fulfilment and renunciation. After her father’s death, like Maggie, Evans/Eliot decided to earn her own living as an independent woman. But when she became the mistress of a married man her favourite brother Isaac, the model we assume for Tom Tulliver, refused to have anything to do with her.

It’s mostly written in the past tense, using the third-person omniscient point of view. The narrative is framed by a present tense narrator who seems to regard her role as guiding her readers around an art gallery; this present tense narration also breaks into the narrative occasionally.

Spoiler alert: The following discussion will provide substantial clues to the development of the story.

The themes of the book
“Oh to be torn ‘twixt love and duty” (as they sing in High Noon)

This is not just a perennial Victorian theme, it is a fundamental question for humankind: as a social animal we have obligations not just for self-fulfilment but also to our clan, our tribe and society at large. On one level it is the theme explored by Romeo and Juliet: the headstrong Maggie is a Juliet and Philip is the son of her father’s mortal enemy; reconciliation only comes with death.

In MotF, Tom more or less represents duty and Maggie more or less represents passion although much of the battle between these forces happens within Maggie herself. At one point she says to herself: “Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.” But all the characters live their lives on a stage with an audience who is constantly judging them. Disgrace is always just around the corner: for example, the disgrace of 'failure' when Mr Tulliver becomes bankrupt and the threat of disgrace is a girl spends time alone with a boy: “To live respected, and have the proper bearers at your funeral, was an achievement of the ends of existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the reading of your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-men ... by turning out to be poorer than they expected”

At the end of the book, GE uses the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan to hint that we should love our neighbours but acknowledges that the religion practised by “the ladies of St Ogg’s” is not really Christianity but “Society”.(Similarly, in Silas Marner, she characterises the religion of the rural villagers as fundamentally pagan with Christian trimmings.) In the end, Maggie sacrifices her own needs so as not to hurt her friends, and this sacrifice is immediately (within a few sentences) followed by her martyrdom.

I suspect that GE, who in her own life chose the path of love and the consequent social disgrace, intends the reader to feel, as I did, that Maggie has made the wrong choice. Certainly Philip argues cogently against her earlier path of self-renunciation:

• “It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive.” (5.1)
• “You are shutting yourself up in a narrow self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dullness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed—that you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance—to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you. I am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned: you are only trying to stupefy yourself.” (5.3)
• “You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one’s nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape from pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.” (6.7)

How the old control the young

Inter-generational conflict is a common theme in novels (I have explored it in my own novel ‘Motherdarling’). The very first chapter after the Prologue opens with Mr Tulliver discussing Tom’s education and how he wants to shape his son. He succeeds in making Tom a spitting image of his father. And the dead hand of the old isn’t just found in the Patriarchy: the aunts, Mrs Glegg in particular, are determined to impose their rules upon Maggie.

The Prodigal Son

This is another Christian parable mentioned in the book. The story is that one of the two sons of a farmer asks to have his inheritance early so he can go and enjoy himself in a nearby town but when the money runs out he returns home with his tail in between his legs. At this point his father, instead of rejecting him, welcomes him and kills the fatted calf to have a feast to celebrate his son’s homecoming. But the good brother, the brother who stayed, is grumpy, feeling that his virtuousness has been taken for granted.

This is referred to as early as Book 1 Chapter 4 when Luke, the farm hand, asserts that after the prodigal son had returned home, he would “be no great shakes” and Maggie wishes that “the subsequent history of the young man had not been left a blank.” Maggie then runs away from home in Book 1 Chapter 9 and her father welcomes her back. But this is just a dress rehearsal for this theme. When Maggie apparently elopes with Stephen Guest and then returns home, self-righteous Tom, in his role as the good brother, repudiates her. I too was left wishing, with Maggie, that GE had told us what happened next.

Social matters

One of the things that distinguishes GE’s fiction is her concern with ordinary people:

• “We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed corn or the next year's crop.”
• “The human faces had no sunshine in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.”
• “The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record.”
• "Human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception”
• “Good society ... is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid.

Feminism

Eliot makes some savagely ironic comments about male attitudes to women:
"An over ‘cute woman’s no better than a long-tailed sheep: she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.”
“What is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”
“We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to.”

Education

• Mr S’s main method of teaching is to assume that if the pupil hasn’t understood the first time they must repeat the lesson until they do “it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it.”
• “The schoolmasters who are not clergymen are a very low set of men generally ... men who have failed in other trades, most likely.” (1.3)
• Tom wonders why people ever bother with Latin. “It would have taken a long while to make conceivable to him that there ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep and oxen, and transacted the everyday affairs of life, through the medium of this language, and still longer to make him understand why he should be called upon to learn it, when its connexion with those affairs had become entirely latent.”
• “Education was almost entirely a matter of luck—usually of ill-luck—in those distant days.”
• “All boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing to teach: if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened.”

“Though he had never really applied his mind to any one of his lessons, the lessons had left a deposit of vague, fragmentary, ineffectual notions.”

Plot and pacing: a ‘timeline’ of the novel
There is a lot of incident. I have picked what seemed to me to stand out and tried to estimate where they come in the text:

• 9%: Tom quarrels with Bob; the pocket knife (B1C6)
• 12%: Maggie cuts her hair, demonstrating her impetuosity (B1C7)
• 13%: Mr T quarrels with Aunt G (B1C7)
• 16%: Mr T goes to his sister demonstrating that brothers must look after their sisters (B1C8)
• 20%: Maggie runs off to the gypsies (B1C11) again demonstrating her impetuosity; a rehearsal of the ‘Prodigal Son’ theme.
• 22%: The legend of St Ogg (B1C12)
• 25%: Tom goes to school (B1C1)
• 34%: Tom hurts himself with the sword (B1C5)
• 35%: Maggie kisses Philip (B1C6)
• 36%: Key turning point: Maggie tells Tom that they have lost their money (B1C7)
• 41%: Tom stands up to the Aunts (B3C3) In a character sense this is the making of Tom: his stubborn determination to restore the family’s good name will never waver from this point
• 47%: Mrs T persuades Waken to keep Mr T at the mill (B3C7)
• 55%: Maggie goes into a self-denying phase because of Thomas a Kempis (B4C3)
• 57%: Philip meets Maggie in the copse (B5C1)
• 59%: Bob starts Tom in business (B5C2)
• 62%: Philip rages against Maggie’s self-denial (B5C3): this is the theme of the book, the great Victorian theme of passion versus duty. It comes immediately after the great comic scene of Bob and Aunt Glegg.
• 66%: Key turning point: Tom finds out about Philip and Maggie; there is a grand scene (B5C5)
• 67%: Tom pays off his father’s debts (B5C6)
• 68%: Mr T thrashes lawyer Wakem (B5C7)
• 68%: Mr T dies (B5C7) Following this disaster we move on a few years and have a sweet drawing room scene with sweet Lucy and her friends. In plot terms this is a bit like Shakespeare's two citizens who meet in a street and narrate what has been happening over the ensuing gap. In style terms we have moved from a moment of high drama, four key incidents crammed into a few pages, into a much more relaxing interlude.
• 72%: Stephen falls in love with Maggie while teaching her to row (B6C2)
• 74%: Tom and Maggie row again about Philip (B6C3)
• 76%: Tom is offered a share in the business but asks for the Mill instead (B6C5)
• 81%: Philip comes clean to his dad and persuades his father to sell Tom the Mill ... so that Philip can marry Maggie (B6C8)
• 89%: TP: Maggie goes for a row with Stephen, they pass their point; her reputation is besmirched (B6C14)
• 99%: The flood (B7C5) Jane Smiley, in Thirteen ways of looking at a novel, says that the climax of a book comes at the 90% mark. This would mean that the climax of this book comes at the climax of a sub-plot only introduced at the start of Book 6. I mean, it is the climax of the theme of Maggie's impetuousity, and the immediate aftermath is an apparently irreconcilable breach between Tom and Maggie, but in terms of climax the death of Mr T would be it for me.
• 99%: The flood (B7C5)

Transitions

There are some wonderful moments when everything changes.

For example, in Book 2 Chapter 6 Tom is reconciled with Philip and Maggie and Philip kiss. The very next chapter recounts events that happen some years afterwards but in terms of the book we are only talking about a few pages and disaster replaces the earlier harmony. This abrupt transition is compared to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the walled garden of paradise. The childhood innocence embodied in that kiss is lost (the intervening years have turned the children into adults and Maggie now realises that a young lady must not kiss a young man). God cursed Adam thus: “By the sweat of your brow, you will produce food to eat” and Tom must now leave school and work for his living.

At the end of Book 5 we have a roller coaster. In chapter 5, FTom finds out about Maggie and Philip who have had clandestine meetings: furious, Tom insults Philip and demands that Maggie never sees him again without first consulting him. In chapter 6, Tom, triumphant, pays off his father’s debts. And in chapter 7, coming back from the meeting in which he had redeemed himself (both financially and reputationally) Mr Tulliver assaults Mr Waken, has a seizure and dies but not before insisting that Tom “take care of” his sister - which Tom, natch, interprets in patriarchal terms. The wheel of fortune can never have turned so quickly.

But these transitions, sudden as they are, are trumped by that at the end of the book. Maggie finally makes up her mind to sacrifice her own interests to the demands of her friends and family ... and the flood that is to take her life begins within two paragraphs.

The ending

For me, the ending is one of the most disappointing features of the book.

It is heavily foreshadowed from the start. In Book 1, Mrs T twice has a vision of Maggie being "drownded". Book 2 starts with the legend of Saint Ogg, a ferryman, carrying a virgin across the river; this seems like a reference to the Ancient Greek myth of Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across the Styx into the Underworld. Book 4 starts with a flood on the Rhine. There are repeated references throughout to turbulent waters. So it is clear that Eliot always knew where the story would end.

And yet she also knows the difficulty of endings. When discussing the story of the Prodigal Son with Luke, he points out that even after the joyful reunion he believes that the prodigal would be "no great shakes" and Maggie wishes "that the subsequent history of the young man had not been left a blank." (1.5) It is as if GE is saying that the parable should have been continued but couldn't be. And in Book 5 Chapter 1, discussing a book called 'The Pirate' with Philip which Maggie had never finished, she says: "I went on with it in my own head and I made several endings; but they were all unhappy. I could never make a happy ending out of that beginning." This feels as if GE is telling us that there might have been alternative endings to MotF but the one she has selected is the happiest possible. Because the alternative to Maggie and Tom dying in one another's arms, reconciled, is Maggie living out the rest of her life as an unfulfilled and increasingly bitter spinster.

Maggie herself understands this. Almost the final act of her life is to renounce her hope of love with Stephen. But she fears that she might not be able to keep her vow of chastity. "I will bear it, and bear it till death. But how long will it be before death comes! I am so young, so healthy. How shall I have patience and strength? Am I to struggle and fall and repent again?" (7.5)

Fortunately (?) she doesn't have to live much longer. Within a few lines of these words, she feels water under her feet: the flood has started. From now on she will be in the boat with St Ogg, heading towards death.

I submit that, despite the foreshadowing (and perhaps GE felt the need for such heavy-handed foreshadowing precisely because she was aware that the flood would otherwise be a bolt from the blue), the flood is a 'deus ex machina', an unprompted device designed to get to the (happiest possible) ending. It's just a little too convenient. It stops the story just where the prodigal son parable stops. But I agree with Maggie in wishing the story hadn't ended there. Imagine Maggie living into defiant old age, outcast by scandal from society, perhaps marrying Philip and having an affair with Stephen, or maybe staying single until another suitor came along. 

Characters

Eliot draws some wonderful characters. Some of them are Dickens-style caricatures, others are more complex. But none of the characters, except perhaps for Maggie, can be said to have a character arc. Tom is self-righteous and inflexible and determined to do his duty throughout. No-one changes over the course of the novel.

Maggie, the protagonist

Maggie is impulsive. When the aunts praise pretty Lucy and criticise Maggie's untameable hair she goes upstairs and cuts her hair off: “She didn’t want her hair to look pretty—that was out of the question—she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her.” Then, too late, she regrets it: “She could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever; for Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstance of an active imagination.”

Maggie is, perhaps, better than Tom because she knows when she has done wrong but he doesn't:

• “Sometimes when I have done wrong, it has been because I have feelings that you would be the better for, if you had them.”
• “If you had done anything very wrong, I should be sorry for the pain it brought you; I should not want punishment to be heaped on you. But you have always enjoyed punishing me—you have always been hard and cruel to me: even when I was a little girl.”

Tom says about Maggie that he can “never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.”

GE has Maggie think: “It seemed as if he held a glass before her to show her her own folly and weakness—as if he were a prophetic voice predicting her future fallings—and yet, all the while, she judged him in return: she said inwardly that he was narrow and unjust” and then say: “you ought not to treat me with hard contempt on the ground of faults that I have not committed yet.” So much for pre-emptive strikes!

Tom, the antagonist

Tom’s principal characteristic is his determination to hold to whatever course he has fixed. This is already shown in his childhood quarrel with Bob in which, reluctantly, he forfeits the joys of hunting rats because Bob has tried to cheat him. Tom is resolute duty. He is utterly self-righteous, always certain that he is in the right. He never has any regrets. 

• “If Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, ‘I’d do just the same again.’ That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.” What's more, he nevewr
• “Tom was ... quite sure that his own motives as well as actions were good, else he would have had nothing to do with them.” (5.5)
• His sister tells him: “You have no pity; you have no sense of your own imperfection and your own sins.” (5.5)

Perhaps Tom’s determination to do the right thing as mandated by his social circle stems from his innate shyness. “He stood looking at nothing in particular, with the blushing, awkward air and semi-smile which are common to shy boys when in company—very much as if they had come into the world by mistake, and found it in a degree of undress that was quite embarrassing.”

Is Tom dyslexic? His dad says: “He isn’t not to say stupid; he's got a notion ‘ things out o’ door, an’ a sort o’ common sense, as he’d lay hold o’ things by the right handle. But he's slow with his tongue, you see, and he reads but poorly, and can’t abide the books, and spells all wrong, they tell me.”

Philip, Maggie’s soul mate

Philip Wakem, hunchbacked son of the Lawyer, is sensitive and intelligent and a perfect mate for Maggie. But he can be angry and his anger is often triggered by references to his deformity, a sadness which haunts his whole life:

• “Philip felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a northern spring.”
• “Philip had only lived fifteen years, but those years had, most of them, been steeped in the sense of a lot irremediably hard.”
• “Like all persons who have passed through life with little expectation of sympathy, he seldom lost his self-control and shrank with the most sensitive pride from any noticeable betrayal of emotion.”

Philip is a renaissance man, though he sees himself as no more than a dilettante: “I think of too many things—sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I’m cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediæval literature, and modern literature: I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”

Mrs Tulliver:

Mrs Tulliver is a meek and mild woman: “Mrs Tulliver never went the length of quarrelling with her, any more than a waterfowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.”

She is most affected by her husband's bankruptcy (she spends years ineffectually warning him against going to law but he always ignores her) by the loss of her 'best' household linen and her silver teapot; a very property-based understanding of tragedy.

Mr Tulliver:

Mr Tulliver contains the impetuosity of Maggie (he has a row with Aunt Glegg which leads to him refusing to continue borrowing money from her (which leads to the financial pressures which lead to his downfall) with the determination of Tom. It is his insistence that he will go to law that brings on the family's bankruptcy; it is his feud with Lawyer Wakem that brings on Mr T's apoplectic death. Even on his death-bed, he refuses to forgiven his enemy.

Other characters:

There is a large cast of important supporting characters offering perfect cameo roles for character actors. These are mostly Mrs Tulliver's sisters and their husbands. These 'aunts' are comically conceived but they are also a Greek chorus who represent the forces of public opinion in all its shades:

• “When one of the family was in trouble or sickness, all the rest went to visit the unfortunate member, usually at the same time, and did not shrink from uttering the most disagreeable truths that correct family feeling dictated: if the illness or trouble was the sufferer’s own fault, it was not in the practice of the Dodson family to shrink from saying so.”
• “There was a general family sense that a judgment had fallen on Mr Tulliver, which it would be an impiety to counteract by too much kindness.”

Mrs Glegg is the childless aunt and is therefore most expected to be a source of a legacy for Tom and Maggie some day but she is also the one who stands most on the dignity of the Dodsons (Mrs T’s maiden name) and sees kin as a wall dividing those who matter from those who don’t. She always accuses her husband Mr G if keeping her in the dark and doing whatever it is she still needs persuading to do. Both of them are very cautious with their money, of which they have quite a lot; Mrs G cloaks her refusal to give anyone any charity in a cloak of the morality of people should stand on their own two feet; this will become particularly poignant when Mr T becomes bankrupt and the Aunts refuse to help.

• “She despised the advantages of costume, for though, as she often observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way to wear her new things out before her old ones."
• "To look out on the weekday world from under a crisp and glossy front, would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular.”
• “Mrs Glegg held her large gold watch in her hand with the many-doubled chain round her fingers, and observed to Mrs Tulliver, who had just returned from a visit to the kitchen, that whatever it might be by other people’s clocks and watches, it was gone half-past twelve by hers.”
• "It’s right as somebody should talk to ’em, and let ’em know their condition i’ life, and what they’re come down to, and make ’em feel as they’ve got to suffer for their father’s faults.’

Mr Glegg is wonderfully hen-pecked but he has some character of his own:

• “Mr Glegg, having retired from active business as a wool-stapler, for the purpose of enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had found this last occupation so much more severe than his business, that he had been driven into amateur hard labour as a dissipation, and habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners.”
• “There was no humbug or hypocrisy about Mr Glegg: his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale of a widow’s furniture, which a five-pound note from his side-pocket would have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person ‘in a small way of life’ would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness rather than ‘charity,’”

Mrs Deane has a lovely daughter Lucy who always looks so beautiful (in comparison with Maggie whose beauty lies in her wildness rather than her ability to look good in beautiful clothes).

Mr Deane has worked his way up into a partnership with one of the bigger firms in the locality. “Mr Deane’s box had been given him by the superior partners in the firm to which he belonged, at the same time that they gave him a share in the business, in acknowledgment of his valuable services as manager. No man was thought more highly of in St Ogg’s than Mr Deane.”

Mrs Pullet is always convinced that she is about to die and is always reminded of her mortality by an excessive interest in the illnesses of others. Mr Pullet is rich and they have their own carriage: 

• “Mrs Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.”
• “Mr Pullet was a small man, with a high nose, small twinkling eyes, and thin lips ... He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.” (1.7)

One of the most important other characters is Bob, the lower class boy Tom befriends as a child, who grows up to become a trickster with a heart of gold.

• “If I wasn’t to take a fool in now and then, he’d niver get any wiser.”
• “He doesn’t mind a bit o’ cheating, when it’s them skinflint women, as haggle an’ haggle, an’ ’ud like to get their flannel for nothing, an’ ’ud niver ask theirselves how I got my dinner out on’t. I niver cheat anybody as doesn’t want to cheat me”

Writing techniques:

Foreshadowing

There is one heck of a lot of foreshadowing. Most of it involves water:

• “Where's the use o my telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded someday, and then you'll be sorry you didn't do as your mother told you.”
• “The idea of Maggie sitting alone by the pond, roused an habitual fear in Mrs Tulliver’s mind, and she mounted the horse-block to satisfy herself by a sight of that fatal child ... ‘They’re such children for the water, mine are,’ she said aloud, without reflecting that there was no one to hear her; ‘they’ll be brought in dead and drownded some day. I wish that river was far enough.’”
• At the start of book two we are told the legend of St Ogg who was a ferryman (aka Charon?). The local legend has him ferrying a woman across the who blessed him suggesting that those who went in his boat would always be safe: “from henceforth whoso steps into thy boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts.” Then, the story continues, “when the floods came, many were saved by reason of that blessing on the boat. But when Ogg the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting of his soul, the boat loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated with the ebbing tide in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no more. Yet it was witnessed in the floods of aftertime, that at the coming on of eventide, Ogg the son of Beorl was always seen with his boat upon the wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Virgin sat in the prow" 
• “There’s a story as when the mill changes hands, the river’s angry”
• “Journeying down the Rhone on a summer’s day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils,* and making their dwellings a desolation.”
• “He fancied Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall, and he was looking on helpless, till he was awakened by what seemed a sudden, awful crash.”
• “She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the gathering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St Ogg’s boat, and it came nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the boatman was Philip—no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him, and their own boat turned over with the movement,”
• "she will be selling her soul to that ghostly boatman who haunts the Floss—only for the sake of being drifted in a boat for ever.’”

Getting into a boat is a disaster for Maggie, twice! It could be argued that the first disaster foreshadows what will happen in the second.

Other moments of foreshadowing include when Mr T, wanting to recover a £300 loan to his sister who has married a poor farmer and has a large family, realises he can't get his money with ruining his sister. He decides that brothers must always look after sisters which will resonate with the Maggie Tom relationship: “They mustn’t look to hanging on their brothers.’ ... ‘No; but I hope their brothers ’ull love the poor things, and remember they came o’ one father and mother’”

“‘I hope and pray he won’t go to law,’ said Mrs Moss, ‘for there’s never any knowing where that’ll end. And the right doesn’t allays win. This Mr Pivart’s a rich man, by what I can make out, and the rich mostly get things their own way.’”

Pathetic fallacy:

There is a beautiful bit of pathetic fallacy in which a baby has its rattle taken and squawks even when the rattle is returned: “was not to be appeased even by the restoration of the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it taken from her remained in all its force.”

Selected quotes:

• “He had the marital habit of not listening very closely” (1.2)
• “It’s foolish work,” said Maggie, with a toss of her mane,—“tearing things to pieces to sew ’em together again.” (1.2)
• “I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.” (1.2)
• “A fat and floury spider, accustomed to take his fly well dusted with meal, must suffer a little at a cousin’s table where the fly was au naturel” (1.4)
• “She thought it was in the order of nature that people who were poorly off should be snubbed.” (1.8)
• “The present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep” (1.12)
• “She loved Tom very dearly, but she often wished that he cared more about her loving him.” (2.5)
• “If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.” (2.6)
• “The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too” (3.1)
• “Human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate” (4.1)
• “It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants, that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes.” (4.1)
• “The vicar of their pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand at whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female parishioner.” (4.1)
• “Even at school she had often wished for books with more in them.” (4.3) Know what she means!
• “Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them; but the theory that unusual virtues spring by a direct consequence out of personal disadvantages, as animals get thicker wool in severe climates, is perhaps a little overstrained.” (5.3) The theory that, because they can’t see, a blind person must have extraordinary hearing is false.
• “I often hate myself, because I get angry sometimes at the sight of happy people. I think I get worse as I get older, more selfish.” (6.2)
• “The world goes on at a smarter pace now than it did when I was a young fellow.” (6.5) Plus ca change!
• “Each was oppressively conscious of the other’s presence, even to the finger-ends.” (6.6) A stunning description of the uncomfortable feeling that often accompanies sexual attraction.
• “Maggie ... left her ... mother to the compromise between knitting and nodding, which, when there was no company, she always carried on in the dining-room till tea-time.” (6.6)
• “But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,—strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,—prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.” (6.12)
• “Moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.” (7.2)

Hugely readable and highly entertaining, this is a masterpiece of Victorian literature.

August 2019; August 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

George Eliot also wrote:

• Scenes from Clerical Life
• Adam Bede
• Silas Marner
• Middlemarch
• Romola
• Daniel Deronda

An interesting lecture entitled ‘George Eliot and Relationships’ given by Professor Rosemary Ashton on 25th November 2019 at Gresham College can be found here.

'The Pirate', the book that Maggie never finishes, was a three volume novel by Sir Walter Scott which was published in 1821; GE might have read it when young. Minna, the heroine, falls in love with a shipwrecked seaman called Captain Cleveland, not realising that he is a pirate. 

Biographies of George Eliot which have been reviewed in this blog:

• George Eliot by Jenny Uglow
• George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton