July 23
George Eliot’s Romola (1863), couldn’t finish it, and her story duet - The Lifted Veil (1859) and Brother Jacob (1864), the best of this group, a strange and dramatic story about a young man who steals from hths mother to a leave home and advance is career but who is undone by his affectionate and naive brother with disabilities.
The Human Factor (1978) should be considered among Graham Greene’s strongest works of fiction, alongside The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory, et al., but I supposed it’s downgraded by readers and connoisseurs because in structure at least just a story about uncovering a leak in the British MI5, in other words, an entertainment, whereas it’s also, primarily, a love story about an agent in Africa who falls in love with a Black woman, whom he brings home with him to the London, along with her child whom he adopts as their son - yet pressures build as we learn and surmise more about the security leak and the role this agent has played (and why). I would say GG makes the going a little tough for all readers, unfortunately, by his strange affectation of having many characters use names that start w/ the same initial (C and W in this case), whereas all readers know it’s easier to address a novel or play if characters’ names don’t coincide. Not an easy book, but a moving and powerful look inside the workings of the bureau of spies (reminded me a little of Shirley Hazard’s take down of the UN bureaucracy).
Despite hating it when forceed to read it (abridged) in grade, people still read George Eliot’s Silas Marner and find it actually quite good, and people still read and enjoy Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, and others - all leading up to the classic, Middlemarch and the dark and mysterious Daniel DeRonda - but there’s that middle period immediately before Middlemarch when Eliot wrote the dismal Romola and the equally unreadable Felix Holt: The Radical (1866) - who could predict that something as grand as Middlemarch would follow? She must have been struggling with the 2 duds for a reason, perhaps perfecting her capacity for writing long and ostentatiously intelligent sentences, but we don’t read novels for sentences, and in these two he takes forever to get any semblance of a plot in motion and her characters are windy and largely interchangeable. It’s with good reason that Eliot’s middle-period novels are today largely unknown, unread, and out of print; they’re lousy books, but much good was to follow. The pathways of writers can be like a maze, circular and enwrapped in dead ends - with sometimes a breakthrough.
William Trevor’s novel Nights at the Alexandra (1987) has one thing going for it: It’s short (ca 90 pp). I continue to wonder why Trevor, clearly one of the top two or three writers of short stories in the late 20th/early 21st century could be such a disaster as a novelist - not that his novels are all that bad but they just cannot measure up to the standard the he himself established. Nights is a good example of that: Yes, it has the components of several novels: domineering father issuing commands and dicta, rivalries between Irish Catholics and Protestants, harsh boarding school, and a young man’s yearning for and fascination with a glamours older woman in town - and yet none of this feels sharp or original, just like wired over plot elements. For ex. the eponymous Alexandra is a movie theater that one of the characters (the forlorn husband of glamorous woman; living in social oscillation as a German who escaped to Ireland during the war) dreams of building the first cinema in the small town - he sees a business opportunity - and in fact he accomplishes his goal and the theater is a big hit … and so?? - well the narrator spends some time working as an usher or ticket taker but this says nothing about the culture of the town, the effect of the theater on the town, on the young man - anything! Couldn’t there be some plot development regarding the German living in town and how he’s received, or not? Not a disaster but a total disappointment of missed opportunities here - at least it was short.
