Silas Marner - George Eliot

It took me almost 40 years to get around to reading George Eliot, but damn it, I got there in the end. I’ve owned a paperback copy of Silas Marner for maybe half that time, but whenever I went to pick it up something else would catch my eye, until a couple of weeks ago when I needed a new book to bring with me to the Nordik Spa and wanted a paperback small enough to fit in a bathrobe pocket. Perhaps not the ideal reason to choose a book, but you get what you get.

The story has an elegant, almost fairy tale simplicity, and is told in such a fashion, with Eliot maintaining a descriptive distance form her characters. The eponymous Marner is a weaver who lived in a strict religious sect. When framed for robbery by his best friend, he faces exile to a small English town where everyone knows everyone else and outsiders remain outsiders for life. There he sets up a profitable business weaving textiles, accumulating riches that he pores over with rapture at every free moment. He has no real wants and is not saving the money for any purpose, but merely values its accumulation.

The village is ruled over by the aging Squire Cass, whose fortunes will go to his oldest son Dunstan. However, Dunstan is under the thumb of his younger brother Godfrey, who is blackmailing him in exchange for not revealing that he was secretly married to a commoner in another village. Dunstan agrees to let Godfrey sell his prized horse, but Godfrey foolishly gets it killed before he can close the deal. On his way home, he comes across Silas’s cottage and robs him of his gold. Silas, despondent, goes to the town for aid. His loss endears him to the townsfolk, who had previously considered him strange and aloof.

Some time later, Dunstan’s first wife rides to town with the intention of confronting hm with his daughter. However, she dies en route and the daughter finds her way to Silas’s cottage. He takes guardianship of the girl and through parenthood finds peace from the loss of his money.

There is more o the book, but this arc serves as a parable that guides the overall story. Despite its focus, Marner himself can go whole chapters without making an appearance, and much time is spent with the townsfolk, where Eliot sketches a mocking but affectionate picture of small town provincialism.

The prose is very much of its era, with the omniscient narrator often summarizing events rather than describing them. The style can strike the modern reader as didactic and dry, but Eliot observes with a keen eye and breathes life into archetypes. A good book worth reading.

Perhaps I’ll get to Middlemarch by the time I’m 80.

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolfe

I wanted to like To the Lighthouse a lot more than I actually did. As a work of art and a formal experiment, I admire it and the skill Wolfe displays in writing it, but as a novel I simply couldn’t connect with it. Everything about it is so relentlessly internal, a rushing river of thoughts from the first mountaintop dribbles along the many winds and tributaries of its watershed to the final languid delta where the waters meet the sea.

Virtually everything that happens, happens in the characters’ heads. Outside of these musings, the plot is (by design, admittedly) so trivial that just describing it sounds like I’m insulting it. A boy and his mother want to go visit a lighthouse but can't; later the boy does but the mother is dead. A man tells a lady that women can’t paint pictures but then she paints one and it’s pretty good. As far as external conflict goes, that’s about all you get.

Wolfe’s prose is rich and evocative, and her characterization is effective even when the characters themselves do little. I don’t deny it’s a good book, perhaps even a great one, but it wasn’t for me.

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Dickens has long been one of the more embarrassing gaps in my literary knowledge. Prior to picking up Great Expectations, the only book of his I’d read was A Tale of Two Cities—a good book, but one not very representative of his typical themes. With its orphaned protagonist, family intrigue, and dissection of the English class system, Great Expectations is much more the quintessential Dickens novel—exactly the sort of story one thinks of as “DIckensian.”

The story is narrated by the aforementioned orphen, a boy named Pip, who begins the novel in the care of his overbearing and resentful sister and her kindhearted but simple husband Joe. A chance encounter with an escaped convict echoes through his life in unexpected ways, though at the titme it seems only to cause him a few days of fear and discomfort. As he grows older, Pip makes the acquaintance of an eccentric shut-in named Miss Havisham, who wears a wedding dress in lamentation of her betrayal by a jilting lover, and her beautiful but cold adopted daughter Estella, whom Pip falls in love with. The story teaks an unexpected turn when Pip learns that a mysterious benefactor has provided him with the financial means necessary to become a gentleman, and he departs for London under the guardianship of the lawyer Jaggers.

The story is full of melodrama and the characters are drawn broadly, demonstrating the heights of either vice or virtue, but both of these characteristics are so dinstinctly ties to Dickens that it would be naive not to expect them. They are simply part of his style, and the richness of his prose and the power of his stories makes them work.

One aspect of the story that surprised me was its humour. It’s been a while, but I don’t recall A Tale of Two Cities as being particularly funny, so some of the great turns of phrase in this book struck me off guard. Dickens wields an erudite wit, dealing slashes of irony so sharp and fine their presence isn’t felt until a couple of sentences later. His writing is rewarding for this, along with its imagery, but it can be dense at times to a modern reader, so my pace was a bit slower than it would be typically be. The book definitely whetted my appetit for more Dickens, though I’ll likely take a break with lighter fare in the meantime.