Continuing a sustained period of immersion in long novels, I've begun Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which follows a winter of Donna Tartt and, most recently,
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin) Having sat in front of these 900 pages in the summer of 1979 and thought it a worthy book and gaining a slight grasp of its central story lines, I came back to Middlemarch 35 years later to reflect what a waste of time that was and that such a marvellous book is much better appreciated by a more mature reader.
Of course, it takes its time but it is immaculately judged, meticulously worked out and its understated tone of worldly sense combines its themes in what has been praised in various ways as 'the closest thing to War and Peace in English literature' and a proper, grown-up novel.
It is important that it is provincial, and Coventry counted as provincial then as presumably everywhere outside of the M25 does now. There are the ways that the aspirations or proper places in the world for each character fit unsatisfactorily with the situations they find themselves in. Dorothea would appear to be a saintly figure, by the estimation of others as well as perhaps her own idealized view of her own well-meant hopes, but even she accepts less than she was perhaps due, or maybe that was her due and she is happy enough with it.
Lydgate's ambitions are diminished from high-minded research and achievement to merely earning a living serving those who can afford him while Casaubon's dessicated academic pursuits dry him out so much that he dies to release Dorothea into a codicil that means she can't be both rich and happily married. Eliot's writing in the passages with her and Will are tremendous.
Fred Vincy is reformed, Bulstrode is ruined, characters are given tellingly suitable names and, for the most part, it ends happily enough ever after with illusions dispelled and, with a finely-tuned moral compass, Eliot resolves the complex network of relationships and social structure in a sublimely well-made book.
My slip of paper forever to be left in my old copy has 11 page references to look back on where there were brilliant passages, either of thematic or almost 'poetic' value. I'm not going to bore you with all of them but I loved, when after 644 previous pages, Eliot can still write,
News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are)
Brilliant. Rather against my expectation (because I wasn't sure how far I was going to go with it at first), it has to be one of the finest novels in the language.
And then I picked up a copy of this from a table of second hand books, which I will pay for when I get the opportunity,
John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells (Murray)I suppose I thought I'd already read this but until seeing the whole poem together like this I probably hadn't realized that I'd only seen extracts.
For those of us of the right age to have become aware that there was a Poet Laureate when it was John Betjeman then there really can only be him. Although the subsequent laureates have all been fine poets, none fitted the title like he did.
While this account of growing up, from early childhood to being sent down from Oxford, includes several pieces of the typically rhymed and chiming verse that one associates with the old boy, it is for the most part in blank verse, almost prosaic by his standards but not by the standards of many other English C20th poets.
It is immediately evocative of the strange world he lived in, a world it is difficult for us to believe ever really happened apart from in films and the imagining of a Golden Age. But here is evidence enough in autobiography from one for who it was very real indeed.
It isn't quaint, rose-tinted England for him and he brings it alive so convincingly that we know that, for some quite pivileged sorts, it was so. Maurice Bowra and T.S. Eliot are fondly remembered, as are bullying, adolescent trauma, infatuation and there is evidence that once upon a time one could go to university because you were good enough, spend all your time enjoying yourself, get sent down and be told you were only going to get a third anyway and still become a best-loved poet.
Explain that to Michael Gove.
This is Betjeman's best work, bar just about everything apart from Indoor Games Near Newbury.
